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Silverstein 7 German Converts to Islam and Their Ambivalent Relations with Immigrant Muslims Esra Özyürek 141
172
Part Four Attraction and Repulsion in Shared Space
8 Muslim Ethnic Comedy: Inversions of Islamophobia Mucahit Bilici 9 Competing for Muslims: New Strategies for Urban Renewal in Detroit Sally Howell List of Contributors Index 195
209
237 239
.vi
Contents
Part Three Violence and Conversion in Europe
6 The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in France and North Africa Paul A.

Alexander Knysh.Acknowledgments
This book grows out of intellectual exchanges that began in October 2007 at “Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend. I would like to thank Mark Tessler. and the anonymous reviewer at Indiana University Press. good ideas. Finally. for the generous support he has given this project from start to finish. I owe special gratitude for their persistence. Some of the conference participants could not contribute essays to this volume. and Mayanthi Fernando for helping us map out topics and approaches that would ultimately be explored by others.” the inaugural conference of the Islamic Studies Initiative (ISI) at the University of Michigan. and Juan Cole and Sherman Jackson provided early inspiration. but I would like to thank Engseng Ho. Lara Deeb. I would like to thank Rebecca Tolen. and Naamah Paley came to the project late. and Esra Özyürek. director of the ISI. Mucahit Bilici.
vii
. for shepherding the volume through to print. while other duties weighed heavily on them. who encouraged us to add additional layers of critical nuance to our essays. director of the International Institute at the University of Michigan. Paul Silverstein. Moustafa Bayoumi. Marcia Hermansen. Tomaž Mastnak. which has been greatly improved by their efforts. Sally Howell. Muhammad Qasim Zaman. helped conceptualize the original conference. To the other contributors. Bryce Adams handled logistics. and gracious dealings with their editor. I thank them for their keen interest and ability to adapt ongoing work to the needs of this volume.

.

IslamophobIa / IslamophIlIa
.

.

The link between terrorism and Islam was firm long before September 11. Algeria. or both. and Europe.” a generalized fear of Islam and Muslims. is pervasive “Islamophobia.Introduction
Islam as an Object of Fear and Affection
Andrew Shryock
The twenty-first century is still young.” To speak more precisely. global in scope—dedicated to the detention. as Muslim. questioning. It has produced bus and train bombings in Europe. and history conveyed in terms like “the Muslim world” and “the West. politicians. Arab. where
1
. and it will end when “terror” has been defeated. all of this began with the 9/11 attacks. and have defined themselves. war efforts. culture.S. military now occupies two Muslim-majority countries. As a social and political problem. but it is already proving to be an especially bad time for relations between the Muslim world and the West. and massive new government structures—again. some explicitly Muslim in orientation.S. if we accept the grand collapse of geography. where it faces multiple armed resistance movements. The result. in several African states with sizable Muslim minorities. Or so it would seem. although related strains of it are well developed in India and China. In the short-term memory of our media age. intellectuals. attacks on globally dispersed targets linked to support for U. Egypt. Islamophobia is almost always associated with the U.S.1 but it has grown stronger in recent years as high-profile enemies in the war on terror have been defined. and other interested parties. Lebanon). The violence exchanged by these forces is not confined to the roadsides of Iraq or remote villages in Afghanistan. with few exceptions. and elimination of suspects and “combatants” who are. and even in Muslim-majority countries (Turkey. now recognized by journalists. the U. Muslim. 2001. others less so.

2 The latter claim is widely perceived to be a slur. the content of this worldview has become so predictable that we can use it to generate a reliable profile. who is apt to believe that Muslims are (openly or in the secrecy of their own mosques and languages) violent extremists. This sketch of our current political climate is beset by the sins of wartime analysis. or anti-immigrant. they pose a significant threat to the civil liberties of the tens of millions of Muslims who now live in Western countries.S. of the contemporary Islamophobe. and electoral campaign smears in which a candidate is linked to Muslim extremists or (in the case of Barack Obama) is said to be a Muslim. sensational press coverage of “the Muslim threat. Across all these contexts. even necessary. and legislation averse to certain traditions of Islamic practice. or fear Islam. They also threaten the national security of Muslim-majority states. oppressive of women. Laws preventing Muslim girls from covering their hair in school. when it is used to describe a sentiment that flourishes in contemporary Europe and North America. acts of violence against Muslims. Scott 2007). and dedicated to establishing Islamic law around the world. secularist. to most French citizens (Bowen 2007. and has its richest connotations. not simply a mistake—and never a compliment—because of the suspicion. Islamophobia. where many immigrants from non-European nations are Muslim. a stereotype. anti-Muslim sentiment is a prominent trend in right-wing political movements. In its American forms. that Islam is somehow antithetical to democratic values. Islamophobia is often posed as the motivation behind acts of mosque vandalism. but the word is most frequently invoked. as a unifying concept. prevalent among even the most tolerant of bourgeois multiculturalists. The term “Islamophobia” could reasonably be applied to any setting in which people hate Muslims. hate crimes against individuals thought to be Muslim. and Europe. averse to democracy. foremost among them the tendency to reduce very complex histori-
. anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. for instance. nationalist. can be variously interpreted as racist. culturally backward.” the selective policing and surveillance of Muslim communities.2
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
prominent political parties and opposition groups are Islamist in orientation. and the sensibilities nurtured within that framework produce a predictable range of stereotypes. brings all of these possibilities into a single framework.3 To the extent that such beliefs shape government policy in the U. Indeed. and where Europeanborn Muslim populations are growing steadily. and in more mainstream political culture as well. In Europe. who must share global space with a suspicious and frequently hostile superpower. seem entirely acceptable.

so is Islamophobia. empire. but potentially misleading for analytical and interpretive ones. just as (and largely because) modern forms of secularism and nationalism do. the tendency to fix Islamophobia. Perhaps it depends for its imagery and appeal on ideological residue from much older contests between European and Ottoman powers. just as a Hizbullah militant does not identify as a terrorist.Introduction
3
cal patterns to ideologically useful concepts. to understand how the concept solves and creates problems for those who use it. Islamophobia is something one should denounce. a fact that makes the labels invaluable for political purposes. Without a careful assessment of contemporary geopolitics and deep historical relations between Muslim and non-Muslim societies. When seen as a condition akin to homophobia. or cure. Given the scant knowledge of Islam most Americans and Europeans bring to the creation of their anti-Muslim stereotypes. Applying these labels is an exercise in negative characterization. Finally. It is also obvious that Islamophobia draws its symbolism more from European and American models of race. can we be sure that Islamophobia is ultimately about Islam at all? Perhaps it is better explained in relation to ideas adapted from Cold War polemics. geographically. past or present. and no sustained relations with Muslims except relations of real or imagined conflict. These additional agendas are valuable because we know far too little about what Islamophobia signifies. and the people the terms are applied to seldom accept their validity. or treat. Both terms are polemical in nature. and human progress than it does from political symbolism dominant among Muslims. and what histories come embedded in the term and its usage. The FBI agent investigating a Muslim charity does not consider herself an Islamophobe. anxiety about Islamist movements and outright fear of particular Muslims can flourish in Muslim societies. as a result. If terror is one of these. what alternative sensibilities it brings into relief.
. when the audiences receptive to them have little or no practical knowledge of Islam. one could also approach Islamophobia—much as critical scholarship has approached terrorism4 —with different ends in mind: namely. One could argue that American and European varieties of Islamophobia are especially powerful. in North America and Europe is itself questionable in an age of pervasive globalization. it is hard to understand what people are afraid of when they fear Islam. Popular ideas about Islam have transnational consequences and are part of transnational political hierarchies. why it is necessary. Without denying the merit and urgency of such responses. and are most effective as tools of political mobilization. in which formerly Red scares are now Green.

is “an unfounded hostility towards Islam” as well as “the practical consequences of such hostility in unfair discrimination against Muslim individuals and communities. for instance. the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political and social affairs” (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia 1997: 4). The insertion of an escape clause—unfounded hostility toward Islam—in the Runnymede definition has not insulated the concept of Islamophobia from criticism. a neoconservative political commentator whose views on Islam and Muslims are consistently negative (see chapter 2). .S. It has been roundly denounced as an exercise in political correctness by politicians and pundits who would like to reserve their right to criticize Islamists (or Muslims. . (http://www. Islamophobia is demonstrably new. . Muslims should dispense with this discredited term [Islamophobia] and instead engage in some earnest introspection. Widespread usage in the U.4
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
A Troubling Term
As a label describing a distinctive form of intolerance. Daniel Pipes.danielpipes. a think tank specializing in ethnic and racial diversity issues. versus non-Muslims and Muslims alike? What. is a post-9/11 phenomenon—it is difficult. It was the centerpiece of Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. to find a book with Islamophobia in its title published before 2001—and the term first rose to prominence in Britain in the late 1990s. The report was written in response to anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain. and . Islamophobia. a report issued in 1997 by the Runnymede Trust. He also questions the idea that fear of Islam can be treated as irrational:
What exactly constitutes an “undue fear of Islam” when Muslims acting in the name of Islam today make up the premier source of worldwide aggression. but one widely viewed as alien in its values and desperately in need of national incorporation. Rather than blame the potential victim for fearing his would-be executioner. turning them into a viable political constituency. one wonders. The Runnymede document was intended to speed the latter process along. dismisses Islamophobia as a smokescreen that protects Muslim extremists. .org/3075/islamophobia)
. according to the report. we love death”) and develop strategies to redeem their religion by combating this morbid totalitarianism. These events had mobilized and alienated British Muslims. both verbal and physical. or Islam). which had grown steadily following the Rushdie affair (1989) and the first Gulf War (1990–91). is the proper amount of fear? . they would do better to ponder how Islamists have transformed their faith into an ideology celebrating murder (Al-Qaeda: “You love life.

who have “transformed” the faith into an ideology. frustration. it is simply portrayed as a dark ideology born out of fear. were among them. Nazism. which often appear in coordinated political and media campaigns. two popular. hardly a phrase can withstand critical inspection (need we wait for the triumph of Islamism to experience a world of “domination and injustice”?).” a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it. fundamentalists over others. We defend the universality of the freedom of expression. We reject the “cultural relativism” which implies an acceptance that men and women of Muslim culture are deprived of the right to equality. and the joint statement. Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women. so that a critical spirit can exist in every continent. makes such distinctions even harder to draw in practice. with its urgent appeal to a political morality of light and dark. We appeal to democrats and free spirits in every country that our century may be one of light and not dark. Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. and hatred.”5 Islamism is never clearly defined in the document. Distinguishing between those two activities is difficult in the abstract. towards each and every maltreatment and dogma.” in which a force called “Islamism” is likened to “fascism. References to murderous and totalitarian forces are ubiquitous among those who express such views. In 2006. According to the authors:
Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality. for instance. highly inflammatory commentators on Islam (see chapter 3). yet the most perplexing of these claims is the idea that Islamophobia is a “wretched” concept because it confuses critique of religion with the stigmatization of religious people. “Together Facing the New Totalitarianism. freedom and secularism in the name of a respect for certain cultures and traditions. a collective of prominent literary types produced a public statement. On the contrary. we must ensure access to universal rights for the oppressed or those discriminated against. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia. and Stalinism. The statement is simplistic and alarmist.
.Introduction
5
Note how Muslims are depicted as a collective body that is (or ought to be) responsible for the misdeeds of its criminal element. freedom and secularism wherever it is present.
The signers included Salman Rushdie (who writes and thinks much better than this) and several other writers known for publishing work offensive to Muslims.

many of whom think it is “imprecisely applied to very diverse phenomena. beyond the academy.. campaigns against Islamophobia are often hard for members of the secular intelligentsia to embrace. but has ethnic and racial dimensions as well (Leonard 2003). Wieviorka 2002). with few exceptions. in the years following the 9/11 attacks. These approaches allow individual analysts to blend religious themes with color politics. like race. or conservative (Werbner 2005). as such. or Arabs (Cesari 2002. Islamophobia was originally intended to describe a new form of discrimination. According to Tariq Modood. Among scholars who study older platforms for discrimination. made Islamophobia a target of policy and public education. members of the secular intelligentsia. In France. or they have argued that Muslim identity is no longer exclusively religious. whereas British Muslims are more likely to assess their status in relation to that of Islam: “their sense of being and their surest conviction about their devaluation by others comes from their historical community of faith and their critique of the ‘West’” (2005: 104). whether their tendencies are liberal. advocacy groups and governing bodies in North America and Europe have. just as American Muslims tend to do in practice. but as immigrant populations. nor is it inevitably expressed in crusading language. and especially among activists committed to anti-racist politics. it entailed new forms of expertise (to diagnose it) and new institutional remedies (to offset it). reducing complex forms of discrimination and government policy to a single concept that cannot adequately explain them. Islamophobia is still not a popular analytical term among scholars. progressive.6
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
The controversy surrounding Islamophobia is not confined to op-ed pages. The experts who must respond to claims of a growing Islamophobia and prescribe solutions for it are. ranging from xenophobia to anti-terrorism” (Cesari 2006: 6). or North Africans. Both the European Union
. Meanwhile. in effect bringing Islamophobia and racism into the same analytical frame. the popularization of the Islamophobia concept has not been warmly received. In Britain. anti-racists give great moral and explanatory weight to the relationship between skin color and relative disadvantage. scholars and activists have tended to close this gap by focusing on “the racialization of Islam” (Naber and Jamal 2008). Jackson 2005). anti-racists and Muslim activists often have very different perspectives. centrist. or class. where Muslims have long been studied not as Muslims per se. In the U. Because they privilege religious identity and call for solidarity with causes organized in relation to religious affinities. ethnicity.S. however. or they have considered the role of racial thought and racism in the development of Muslim communities in North America (Dannin 2002. Academics and policy-minded intellectuals have different concerns.

It is important to understand the terminological disputes triggered by the concept of Islamophobia because they are ultimately linked. just as problematic. a governmental agenda. These efforts. has been to facilitate the participation of Muslim minorities in non-Muslim societies. Activist organizations. and democratic. member of a tolerant and inclusive (Western-dominated) family of nations. at heart. or. which are considered genuinely incompatible with Western values. the 9/11 attacks. Lurking behind this formula. Its principal concern. is the “deal breaker”: the Muslim radical. to be secular. Sometimes rejection of the term signals a refusal to admit that Islam. or encouraged. especially those of Europe and North America. ranging from the international (Organization of the Islamic Conference). the terrorist. The exemplary Muslim citizen. since the Runnymede report debuted in 1997. member of the tolerant and inclusive (Western) society. Those who reject the term “Islamophobia” sometimes do so out of an unwillingness to accommodate certain kinds of Muslim difference. in which racism and immigrant status should explain more. suggests that anxieties about Islamophobia—both the social problem and the analytical term—are part of a larger disciplinary regime. The definition and defeat of Islamophobia is. the extremist. Moreover. These imperatives are played out simultaneously on a global stage. across the political spectrum. the first Gulf War. to the national (Council on American-Islamic Relations). the Muslim person or Muslim-majority state that does not want to be incorporated on these terms. has his equivalent in the modern Muslim-majority state. pluralistic. to the thousands of regional and municipality-based Muslim associations now active throughout the Western countries. the favorable incorporation of Muslims. thwarting and distorting it. and therefore deserving of vigorous critique. in nation-states that are assumed. and the societies that must accommodate them (and must do so efficiently and effectively). as citizens and communities. could really be the difference that matters most in modern nation-states. The primary subjects of this regime are Muslims living in the West (who must be made into good citizens). the Madrid and London train bombings. the efflorescence of this agenda after the Rushdie affair. Rather than choose
. have a similar goal: namely.Introduction
7
and the United Nations have embraced the concept. are mobilizing to oppose Islamophobia in public institutions and political life (Sinno 2009). whether undertaken on a local or global scale. or religious belief. organizing high-profile international conferences that address Islamophobia and adding it to the several varieties of racism and intolerance they monitor and combat (see chapter 1). to this larger governmental paradigm. the Danish cartoon affair. and other episodes of violent conflict between antagonists defined as Muslim and non-Muslim.

Others or strangers. or France or Canada are not. the French nation. and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. by strict legal reckoning. intend to negate their “opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence” (1996: 27). existentially something different and alien. the stranger. nevertheless. or as solutions to problems. the contributors to this volume look instead at a wide range of contexts in which Muslims and particular forms of Islam are understood.S. for now. is securing Islam’s relationship to violence. he need not appear as an economic competitor. even if the diverse qualities of the enemy can still be discerned. first and last. so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. the other. or the global ummah of Islam. globally and locally. with varying degrees of anxiety and affection. Muslims are enemies (just as Greeks and Persians were. or communists and capitalists are) when they are judged to be adversaries who. Not everyone agrees that Muslims are existentially alien. (1996: 27)
The decision to cast Muslims in this role is a political act.8
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
sides in these debates. whether this group is Muslims in Britain. It generates Islamophobia and. even as people insist on defending them. it is one that can be contested. The fact that these terms—security. At stake in all these contexts are values and political investments that make collective life possible. in a specially intense way. who argued that politics itself is an activity based on the drawing of fundamental distinctions between enemies and friends. the Muslim and the Islamophobe stand in an ideologically perfect relationship when they can see each other. as problems that must be solved. even when their fellow nationals
. but only on certain terms. and it is sufficient for his nature that he is. in Schmitt’s words. citizenship. But he is. as “enemies” in exactly the sense described by Carl Schmitt. and Muslims who live as citizens in the U. democracy. Europe as a whole. and religious freedom—are being renegotiated at a rapid pace. moreover. especially forms of violence widely believed to threaten the physical and cultural integrity (and thus the continued existence) of a group.
The Politics of Inversion: From Phobia to Philia
As stock characters. The starkness and analytical utility of this formulation for a discussion of Islamophobia lies in the capacity of “enemy status” to render moral nuance irrelevant. is a contradiction central to this volume. As Schmitt puts it:
The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly.

and the bad Muslim (the enemy) is a creature
. understood as a generalized affection for Islam and Muslims. then constructing selectively positive images of Islam in response to Islamophobic propaganda will have less than helpful. should we not also be concerned about political distortions that might arise from attempts to offset Islamophobic agendas? This question is difficult to consider. and is still actively deployed in anti-Muslim polemics. who might have differences—with non-Muslims and fellow Muslims alike—they think are worth asserting and maintaining.Introduction
9
see them as outsiders. What is harder to assess is the challenge of countering Islamophobic impulses in ways that do not simply invert or reinforce them by cultivating their opposite: the image of the Muslim as “friend. which casts both Islam itself and all Muslims as real or potential enemies in a way that. results. even the ones who live here with us. fear their policies. is what drives Islamophobia and imbues it with missionary zeal.” as a figure identified with the Self. and it can be coercive when applied to Muslims. if similarly applied to Jews or Christians. and hate the violence they espouse without being an Islamophobe. vile at worst. for instance. will be explored throughout this volume. are really Them. as the sentiments of hostility it is meant to correct. and easily misconstrued. comes with its own political costs. People must be convinced and reminded that Muslims. To put it differently. now widely recognized. What is most problematic about Islamophobia is its essentializing and universalizing quality. This image. the insidious nature of Islamophobia is not located in fear alone. is impervious to nuance. Islamophilia. The extent to which this universal application is deeply rooted in European history. consider al-Qaeda an enemy. is the spread of “goodMuslim/bad-Muslim” binaries (Mamdani 2004). an artifact of global immigration and modern regimes of citizenship. since a society or group can define its enemies. would seem delusional at best. as some analysts would argue. If we grant that Islamophobia fits this simple profile and poses a real danger not only to Muslims. If. characterized as familiar. One of these. too. Islamophobia has little to do with real Islam as practiced by actually existing Muslims. When “friendship” is subordinated to the demands of sameness—whether conceived in national or human terms—it can be just as coercive. and sometimes bizarre. nor is it found in the designation of enemies as such. This overlap of inside and outside. or be defined as enemies. in which the good Muslim (the friend) is the real Muslim. as us. One can. just as prone to misrecognition. for entirely legitimate reasons. or in hate. and with whom legitimate conflict is not possible. but also to models of citizenship and human rights that aspire to include Muslims and non-Muslims as equals in the same political community.

When drawn to these specifications. has common features: he tends to be a Sufi (ideally. The good Muslim is also a pluralist (recalls fondly the ecumenical virtues of medieval Andalusia and is a champion of interfaith activism). Counting them and calling them out is not as important. is her husband’s only wife. There are Muslims who advocate and practice violence. he treats women as equals. not a struggle to “enjoin the good and forbid the wrong” through force of arms). and Israel). chose her husband freely. he is likely to be an African. more likely still. which are found. and wears hijab (if at all) only because she wants to. The “good Muslim. The same is true of Islamophobic discourses. one who reads Rumi). but. and is committed to choice in matters of hijab wearing (and never advocates the covering of a woman’s face). he is politically moderate (an advocate of democracy. then she is highly educated. human rights. in varying degrees of completeness. un/safe. he can and should be vigorously opposed. would like to see the universal establishment of shari‘ah law. a South Asian. spiritual contest. but it is not their empirical presence or absence that matters as much as the moral connotations these traits carry when they are used to define the modern. the resemblance between the good Muslim and the Muslim who could serve most effectively as a counter to the anti-Muslim propaganda now being disseminated by Islamophobes is all too apparent. an opponent of armed conflict against the U. and religious freedom. finally.10
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
who violates the good Muslim code. and the corrective imagery we develop in response to it might. thus setting the terms on which Islam is deemed pre/modern.S. safe. or. oppress women. end
. In this light. only a small proportion of Muslims are Arab anyway. Islamophilic discourse returns consistently to this array of features. If we persist in portraying Islamophobia as an irrational force of misperception. or the result of malicious stereotypes. hate Jews. in millions of real Muslims. but the traits that define the good Muslim are just as likely to be based on wishful thinking and a politics of fear. in the manner of a bad diagnosis. an Indonesian or Malaysian.6 as is the affinity between the values of the good Muslim and those of the good citizen of the liberal democratic state. or as dangerous. he is less likely to be an Arab. as the categorical stigmatization that occurs when phobic portrayals of Muslims come to dominate a political field. as friends of the “good Muslim” will point out. works outside the home. if he is a she. and so on. these traits are lacking in millions of real Muslims as well.” as a stereotype. we might render ourselves oblivious to its ultimate causes and consequences. the good Muslim certainly appears less malign than his evil twin. he is peaceful (and assures us that jihad is an inner. Of course. and acceptable Muslim. and un/acceptable.

(3) the odd realignments and misrecognitions that pervade these ideologies. which I will discuss below. I will provide a road map to the book that emphasizes conceptual advances these authors achieve in their discussions of (1) historical continuities and discontinuities in relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in what are now called Western societies. In the remainder of this introduction. Our contributors do not advocate a uniform perspective. The idea that Islamophobia and Islamophilia function as opposites is singled out for special critique. as is the assumption that only non-Muslims can view Islam. to be fondly embraced. and (4) the extent to which Muslims and non-Muslims inhabit spaces. (2) the centrality of ideologies of modernity to Islamophobic and Islamophilic thought. in which their differences are increasingly defined by the moral qualities and political identities they share. they do not accept at face value the key terms under discussion. and this tendency raises special challenges of its own. Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day. but they are motivated by shared analytical commitments. a language of analysis that does not privilege belief or disbelief.
Analytical Interventions
To explore these issues in greater depth. our contributors are wary of the reductive moral discourses that result when Islam is portrayed as an objectified form. I have arranged the essays in hopes of creating conversations among the authors. sometimes playing on unexpected similarities.
. both global and local. or aspects of Islam. A secular outlook. In our rush to identify Muslim friends who think and act like “us. First. sometimes relying on clear contrasts in subject matter or approach. this volume brings together a diverse group of scholars whose research has equipped them to think critically and creatively about Islamophobia and Islamophilia as political projects. through a phobic lens. prevails in these essays.Introduction
11
up reinforcing the very syndrome it was meant to counteract. as a thing. making them highly resistant to critique. While recognizing the dangers of a generically anti-Muslim politics. the contributors are keen to avoid the analytical dead ends that await scholarship (and political action) that accepts a “good-Islam/bad-Islam” dichotomy as its starting point. our authors bring together several distinctive approaches that generate reciprocal arguments and themes. Apart from these shared sensibilities. from North America to South Asia.” we turn those who think and act differently into potential enemies. Generally. the work presented here will challenge popular discourses about Islam as an object of dread and desire.

and the inability to recognize the Arab/Muslim as American. Indeed. the history of anti-Muslim politics is in Europe (and. Opposition to this school was intensely Islamophobic and anti-Arab. and the role of the anti-Muslim. European Christian has been replaced. in the formula made famous by Samuel Huntington.N. Contemporary forms of Islamophobia are shaped (or haunted) by a worldview in which Europe and the Christian world are clearly set apart from an Oriental and Muslim world. These civilizations. as Mastnak suggests in his revealing account of the U. contemporary forms of Islamophilia are shaped (and haunted) by the same moral geography. The great irony of this historical complex is its simultaneous relevance and rather obvious outdatedness. persist in a state of clash. it is important to situate it in larger historical contexts and to specify what about it is genuinely new. Naamah Paley offers a telling contrast to Mastnak’s material by showing how radically the terrain on which Muslims and non-Muslims interact today has shifted. the Islamophobia displayed by opponents of the Gibran Academy is best understood as a function of collapsed boundaries. who figured prominently in the campaign against the school. a public school that features Arabic-language instruction and a practical focus on Arab world societies and cultures. by anti-Muslim American Jews. Paley describes the recent controversy in New York City over the opening of the Khalil Gibran International Academy. the line between Self and Other must be enforced (often in tones of outrage and panic) because this line has already been crossed. It shows not only how entrenched.12
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
Continuities and Transformations
Since Islamophobia is a term of recent vintage. in Europe’s colonial domains). Mastnak’s account is sobering.
. contests over shared public space. and how particular. it also shows how the very notion of Europe is based in a legacy of violent interactions with Muslim Others. Much of this legacy has been successfully reproduced in the present. in Paley’s case. by extension. In chapter 2. In chapter 1. It invoked age-old models of the Muslim enemy.’s Alliance of Civilizations initiative. As Paley argues. arguing that the elaboration of a fundamentally hostile Latin Christian attitude toward Muslims was an outcome of the deep internal crisis of the Western Christian world in the eleventh century. but several of Mastnak’s key variables have changed: the Muslims in question are now members of the larger society. Tomaž Mastnak provides much of this framing. This crisis in Europe led to the Crusades and to an assemblage of anti-Muslim sensibilities that has survived for centuries.

and remains. historical progress. where they provoke old and new anxieties.Introduction
13
The Islamophilia on display is similarly vexed by boundary issues. organized support for the Gibran Academy is oriented toward intracommunal Jewish concerns and the search for “good Muslims” with whom to form secure partnerships. and Reza Aslan. and its institutions. anti-Muslim polemic (in the case of Manji). against backdrops of modernity that are now global in scope. civilization. Irshad Manji. and adapted to the needs of Muslim populations. find it difficult (or counterproductive) to situate Islam within a secular world of politics and responsibility. according to Paley. a hegemonic reality Muslims can hardly ignore. In chapter 3. and the ideological equivalence between modernity. Moustafa Bayoumi subjects the writings of popular Muslim American public intellectuals after 9/11 to a withering critique. removing them from history and producing comfortable alibis for readers who. Europeans long held the upper hand. in Bayoumi’s opinion. All three authors focus attention on the origins and essences of Islam. and this pervasive change is part of the massive restructuring of the Muslim world accomplished during the colonial period.7 As three of our authors argue. when infrastructures of modernity were imposed on and variously resisted. Not only does Bayoumi think these authors cater to the prejudices of Jewish and Christian readers—obviously. and a conciliatory apologetics that holds out (in the case of Aslan) for the possibility of a future Islam that is progressive and reformed.
Modern (Self) Criticism
The juxtaposition of Mastnak and Paley shows nicely the conditions that distinguish contemporary forms of Islamophobia from patterns of hostility that prevailed before the age of European imperialism and the institutionalization of today’s global political and economic systems. Millions of Muslims are now resident in Western nation-states. this ideological climate has produced phobic and philic accounts of Islam among Muslims themselves. who are compelled to criticize and defend Islam. Bayoumi shows how a supposed failure to achieve a convincingly modern state of being is the inspiration for defiant apostasy (in the case of Hirsi Ali). and Western values became.
. taken up by. Focusing on best-selling books by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. with great success in the marketplace—but he also insists that both the Islamophobia of Hirsi Ali and Manji and the Islamophilia of Aslan share a common Orientalist heritage. However collaborative this world-transforming process was in practice.

What is more. was in place long before Western policy analysts discovered (and demonized) the madrasa. This tradition of contestation. and criticisms of tradition.
. backwardness. not Islamophobia. or by marking off their jurisdictions more carefully. While some Muslim scholars have claimed that the madrasa is politically and pedagogically retrograde. where they generate very different discourses. to be described as “traditional” Islamic education was open to debate. which were associated with modernity and progress. Muhammad Qasim Zaman develops an equally counterintuitive analysis. concerns over the proper teaching and public representation of Islam. as recounted by Zaman. Deeb examines how U. and of women’s role in Muslim society. Building on her research among Lebanese gender activists affiliated with Hizbullah. responding directly to each other—or to similar political forces—across what are believed to be vast religious divides. Deeb shows. pushing the boundaries of phobia and philia even further into Muslim cultural space by exploring how. yet which resonate far beyond it. producing Islamophilia. fully Muslim societies. how fear of Shi ‘a in Lebanon. makes heavy use of the images and claims that predominate in American propaganda against Iran. In chapter 5. over the last century. It also reveals competing models of religious authority in contemporary Islam.S. Zaman’s careful exploration of these debates is an illuminating corrective to biased Western accounts of madrasas. by contrast. for instance. has been vigorous. And the debate. With the introduction of European-style secular curricula. with ‘ulama (Muslim scholars) taking up diverse positions on how best to reform the madrasa. the critical concerns of Muslims and non-Muslims often resemble each other. and uncivilized behavior are as vehement among Muslims as they are among non-Muslims. others have insisted that madrasa training can produce an elite stratum ideally prepared to lead fully modern. are acutely developed. For her interlocutors in the Shi‘a suburbs of Beirut. as expressed by their Sunni and Christian opponents. Lara Deeb follows themes of modernity and self-criticism into Muslim-majority society. Muslim scholars across the Middle East and South Asia have criticized madrasas (religious schools).-based transnational discourses about Muslim women provoke alternative gender ideologies explicitly designed to offset depictions of Islam as sexist and oppressive towards women. either by blending religious education with the modern. secular sciences.14
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
In chapter 4. the effectiveness of what came. although the intent of these critiques differs radically. Zaman argues. each of which fosters patterns of anxiety (about other Muslims) and affection (for Islamic tradition) that are internal to the Muslim community.

but from points of view rarely taken up in treatments of Islamophobia in its French and German forms. Arabs. is closely identified with support for Arab political causes. Silverstein traces current patterns of Islamophobia in France back to foundational moments in French colonial policy in North Africa. and handicapped Arabs (who were associated with a fanatical and essentially backward Islam). when sharp distinctions were drawn between French settlers. Indeed. Noting the remarkable degree to which accusations of Muslim intolerance—especially instances of anti-Semitism—are used as ideological cover for discrimination against Muslims.Introduction
15
Violence and Conversion in Europe
Contemporary Europe is filled with Muslims. a state of affairs the inhabitants of Christendom or early modern Europe could only have equated with military defeat. and much of fashionable Islamophilia. calling for recognition of Israel and stressing Jewish elements in Berber folklore and communal ritual. This ambiguity of identity labels. Much of contemporary Islamophobia in France is a national re-enactment of this original assessment of the Arab Muslim as inassimilable. themselves Muslims. with some French Muslims identifying politically with Jews and Israel. expressed in conversion to Islam and the embrace of Muslim popular culture among oppositional French youth. Themes of mistaken identity and cross-dressing emerge in both essays. Two of our authors explore the systematic racism and violence experienced by Muslims in Europe. Berbers.
. Many Berber activists.8 It would be hard to envision a discussion of Islamophobia that did not give attention to French campaigns against the expression of Muslim religious identity in national/public space or the elaborate policies of incorporation and exclusion directed at Turkish immigrants by German authorities. have sought to distance themselves from French disdain for Arabs by promoting a cultural heritage. and some German Muslims harboring intensely anti-Turkish prejudices in the name of Islam. Paul Silverstein interprets violence against French Muslims within larger contexts of French post/colonial history. many Europeans today liken the growing Muslim presence in their countries to an invasion of cultural spaces that are historically Christian and politically secular. that downplays Islam and is openly philo-Semitic. can sometimes make phobic and philic attitudes hard to distinguish. and a political posture. and Jews in personal status law. felt among Muslims as well as nonMuslims across Europe. In chapter 6. These distinctions privileged Jews and Berbers.

The solution to this problem is a more German Islam.16
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
Meanwhile. Ironically. overlapping patterns of attraction and repulsion between actors defined as Muslim and non-Muslim. this love of true Islam often breeds disdain for Muslims. but fragile. and a growing perception of common sense. German converts are apt to conclude that it is Muslims who give Islam a bad name.
Attraction and Repulsion in Shared Space
The essays in this volume suggest that conversion. transregional migration. but similar ideas of authenticity pervade German nationalism. Silverstein argues.
.S. colonial histories. and has now internalized. in the mind of the convert. but are instead producing diverse zones of interaction and contest. this position is also widespread among the children of Muslim immigrants in Western countries. as a set of beliefs and behaviors antithetical to proper Islam. they put the reality of cultural sharing to the test. As Esra Özyürek demonstrates in chapter 7. but as Özyürek shows. one might suppose. The building materials discussed here are Muslim “ethnic humor. Germany does not have the same colonial history. much of which is construed. a Muslim is inconsistent with a reality in which Turks are acquiring German citizenship and Germans are converting to Islam. These phobic and philic trends. and imperial politics in the present are culminating not in a starkly divided world of rival Western and Islamic civilizations.9 Two of our contributors carefully dissect these patterns. the fact that a true German is not. and dreams of upward mobility. is a classic instance of Islamophilia. non-Muslim society. The latter trend. or should not be. and Canada. What they find is a remarkable amount of common ground. and North African youth battle riot police and special security forces in their suburban enclaves. or an Islam that is less beholden to immigrant culture. a regime of citizenship in which Muslims cannot be authentically French.” which is now popular among young Muslims in the U. like Özyürek’s German converts. on which transcommunal alliances can be built. which Muslim immigrants share with members of the larger. and they sometimes fail. are the legacy of French colonialism which institutionalized. must place a strategic distance between Islam (which must be loved) and Muslim immigrants (who clearly are not). The social projects that emerge in these common frameworks are integrative. Although they usually come to Islam through personal relationships of love and friendship with “foreign” Muslims. each filled with complex. prominent French Jewish intellectuals stir up Islamophobic sentiment. who. especially Muslims of immigrant backgrounds.

is proof that anti-Muslim stigma can be harnessed and put to creative use. The Muslim stand-up comedian. and a practical sense of citizenship—of belonging in the U. a genre that has flourished in the aftermath of 9/11. all the while participating in American popular culture as Muslims. As Howell argues. funny. Indeed. Mucahit Bilici takes us on a fast-paced tour of Muslim comedy. scapegoating. there is now intense competition to attract immigrant Muslims to low-income areas of Detroit. it is second-generation American Muslims who are often the funniest. Howell concludes. an urban landscape that has been home to Muslims for over a century. Bilici contends. where their conservative social values and strong family structures can be used to stabilize poor neighborhoods. As Howell shows. and second-generation Muslims who laugh loudest at the jokes. not dampened. Bilici suggests. in a deeply cathartic sense. The magnet school had an entirely Muslim enrollment. is entering a tradition of ethnic humor that accentuates the status of the Muslim (as it did the status of the Jew) as a marginal figure who is wise to the habits of the majority and his own minority group.
. African American school district could not be effectively shared.S. Muslim comedy is an inversion of Islamophobia. Recent attempts by the beleaguered Highland Park Public Schools to lure immigrant Muslims from neighboring districts of Hamtramck and Detroit have failed. In chapter 9. Sally Howell explores grassroots Muslim community work in greater Detroit. and ethnic divisions that set Highland Park apart from its immigrant-rich neighbors were accentuated. not only to engender affection for Muslims.Introduction
17
In chapter 8. because the Muslim-oriented magnet school Highland Park established was so successful. but few of its students were from Highland Park. and can tease both at once. pulled off by artists who can love Islam and poke fun at their co-religionists. ironically. The struggles for upward mobility and inclusion now being fought by Detroit’s Muslims. by this experiment in applied Islamophilia. observing Muslim holidays. class. but to reveal the backdrop of common sense against which Islamophobia appears ridiculous. and hiring Muslim staff. Thus. Bilici explores the peculiar confluence of tragedy. The social and political gains made by Detroit-area Muslims can be seen in their relationships with public schools. or Canada—that makes Muslim comedy good to think about and. The racial. the idea that Muslims could be funny (and were not simply people to be made fun of) was not widespread before the 9/11 attacks. which now cater to Muslim students. the moral virtues of Muslim communal life that appealed most to the administrators of this poor. much to the surprise of community observers. who did not see humor as a form of social criticism available to Muslims in societies that consider them a security threat. The growth of this genre. providing Arabic-language instruction.

and do not simply reflect. and its conceptual weaknesses are easy to diagnose once the extensive overlap of Self and Other is acknowledged. and Muslims are assumed to be participants in the politics of enemy and friend.18
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
are making Muslims part of the city’s pervasive structures of inequality. Polarization is what Islamophobes desire. but Muslims as social actors always are. the realities they purport to describe. but has yet to be replaced by politics of a new kind. Yet the essays featured in this volume suggest that appearances can be misleading. whether historical.
Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend
At first glance. a generalized affection for Muslims is what Islamophiles desire. and new enemies. however.10 At the same time. the inclusion of Muslims in Western societies as citizens is a conflicted process. with obvious ideological bias. through immigration and conversion. for Muslims and the local institutions that compete for them. Mosques can be found in every major city of Europe and North America. In this volume. Islamophobia owes more to the convergence of cultural and political spaces than to their separation. and the idea that Muslims can only be foreigners is now a position that must be vigorously argued. cultural. polarized worldview. Islamophobia would appear to be the product of a rigid. The Muslim presence in the West has been growing steadily for over a century. the move beyond opposed categories of enemy and friend is accomplished through secular criticism. but cannot quite achieve. and it too requires immense ideological effort. but cannot quite achieve. In practice. as threatening figures who want to dominate the West. To reverse our formulation. Islam as a doctrinal system is seldom the focus of analysis. The conditions that make the language of enemy and friend so appealing. or political. This older political language is grounded in reductive patterns of malign and benign misrecognition. as evidence of Muslim difference persists and wars against Muslim-majority nation-states and Islamist militant groups reanimate a time-tested imagery of crusade and jihad. a geopolitical space in which they do not belong and to which they cannot adapt. This tendency explains why our contributors so often detect signs of Islamophobia in Muslim countries (as
. and so inadequate. and once attempts to assert distance between Muslims and a stereotypically non-Muslim West are analyzed as political agendas that make. an outcome that creates new friends. not simply its passive victims. are part of a politics of interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims that no longer describes our world accurately. It demands that Muslims be seen negatively.

for support in developing their own arguments against what they perceive to be the racism. they bring many of the prejudices and cherished values of a larger. properly (re)interpreted. or a new age. and Europe) and why they attribute these phobic signs to modernity and its hierarchy of values. in this sense. and the insights they provoke. most important of all. or Hizbullah gender activists who criticize the sexism of their co-religionists in Beirut. and this creative response to the disciplinary pressures applied to Muslims by nonMuslim observers (or by fellow Muslim critics) is often rewarded with higher levels of political influence and societal inclusion.S.” or “mistaken”—the latter are not properly Islamic. call on Islamic tradition. but can no longer be the dominant frame in which Self and Other are viewed. Inevitably.” “unnecessary.11 These attempts to shift stigma and relocate religious identity are themselves devoted to the recalibration of the enemy/friend binary. The German converts who criticize Turks as poor representatives of Islam in Germany invoke hadith and Quranic verses to justify their position. they can be read as Americanizing. with new perceptions of a common humanity in which Islam is present. and. and real. non-Muslim observer. or Germanizing. in her view—but there is a clear sense in which the Islam that emerges from this process of adjustment has been tempered by an awareness of phobic and philic tendencies prevalent in larger. as do Muslim scholars who criticize madrasas in Egypt and India. One can add to these examples a growing literature that shows how young Muslims in the U. The limits of this disciplinary process are visible on almost every page of this book: in police brutality. political scapegoating. non-Muslim world into Muslim communities that must adapt to life in a new society. or simply modernizing moves. these new distinctions. As such.Introduction
19
well as in the U. or the Hizbullah activist. and the self-loathing manifest by prominent Muslim
. and cultural insularity of their parents. For the person of faith.12 In the case of Muslim comedy in North America.S. As a result. non-Muslim interpretive contexts. not to correct or incorrect understandings of Islamic tradition. Everywhere. the failure of schools. Muslims must take into account the prejudices and expectations of an imagined. who tries to purify Islam of cultural accretions that corrupt it and expose it to ridicule is not likely to see her agenda as phobic in relation to the aspects of Islam she deems “backward. bears a strong resemblance to more “serious” forms of immigrant incorporation. Muslim comedy. new distinctions between Self and Other are constantly woven into Muslim self-definitions. but with an expanded media presence. The Muslim American. are rewarded not only with laughs. a bigger market share. accusations of primitiveness. political docility. this analytical tendency will not necessarily be welcome.

An application of this kind is forbidden in polite. civil rights activism. not in reference to Islam as a set of universal beliefs and practices. This predicament is explained. As hegemonic as it now seems. Muslims (not only in Detroit. the nation-state. antithetical to democracy. the community. the ban defines polite metropolitan society.13 in the literal spread of Islam as a faith into terrain once forbidden to it. a space in which a person’s enemy or friend status does not follow immediately from their status as a Christian or a Jew. The transformative success of the process is also evident: in the growing political incorporation of U. is the extent to which it turns phobic and philic sentiments into the very architecture of identity formation. in the West and in the Muslim world. constructive members of modern society. but across urban America). Yet these themes are common in discussions of Islam.15 Numerous commentators
. understanding their histories. The irony of disciplinary inclusion. in key respects. the moral peculiarity of this political style is revealed immediately. if one tries to apply it to Christians or Jews as such. in the conspicuously modernizing variants of Hizbullah activism in Lebanon. as applied to Islam and Muslims.S. and they are as likely to surface in arguments made by Muslims. and grassroots constituency politics to secure their place in national cultures that once excluded them from public life. metropolitan society. and it encourages the latter to control and marginalize the former. or national identity. is not often made today. or elsewhere in the world of Anglophone mass media—to the consideration of Christianity and Judaism as security threats. citizenship. indeed.S. and their politics. is minuscule. and the transregional diaspora. and in the ability of Muslims to model their identities on those of other ethnoracial and religious minorities who have used humor. and society it favors. or even to modernity. the family. and to the difficult task of turning Jews and Christians into viable. in religious terms. by our authors.20
Islamophobia / Islamophilia
critics of Islam. The argument that Christianity (or Judaism) is. is one of the most important social justice issues of our day. It constructs Muslim enemies even as (or precisely because) it stipulates the qualities of Muslim friends. in the careful blends of Western science and Islamic learning now being developed in educational establishments of the Muslim world. but through reference to the stigmatizing and valorizing powers of modernity and the ideologies of personhood. Because diverse possibilities for incorporation and exclusion are conveyed in these ideologies. faith.14 The space given over in public discourse—in the U. to the links between these belief systems and terror. a contest that unfolds in the self. and those who care to pursue the argument in depth will be treated as intolerant cranks or denounced as anti-Semites. and quite shockingly. as they are by non-Muslim critics and allies. anti-defamation campaigns.

Introduction

21

have argued that, if the twentieth century was defined by problems of race and the color line, the twenty-first will be defined by Islamophobia and the problem of integrating Muslims into modern, democratic societies, both in the West and in the Muslim world. These grand pronouncements bring with them a multitude of problematic assumptions, and they need to be given the same rigorous intellectual attention that has been devoted to the analysis of racism, class inequality, sexism, and other forms of political oppression. The contributors to this volume eagerly take up this task, exposing the tactical ignorance, malign and benign, that suffuses educated opinion on all things Muslim. Neither Islamophobia nor Islamophilia has cornered the market on mis/representation. The essays assembled here offer a deeper, more critical understanding of how these patterns of anxiety and attraction are continually reinvented, how they are expressed in multiple languages of identity, and how they relate to prevailing ideas—of race, gender, citizenship, secularism, human rights, tolerance, and pluralism—that are important to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Notes
1. A tandem reading of Edward Said’s Covering Islam (1981) and Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters (2001), books written twenty years apart, shows the extent to which post9/11 terror talk is a rhetorical continuation of the durable, anti-Muslim motifs that pervade Western media cultures. 2. Incidents of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination are catalogued by several watchdog groups, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The annual reports provided by CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) are especially detailed and are available online at http://www .cair.com/Home.aspx. More specifically, CAIR’s assessment of Islamophobia in the U.S. is available at http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx. 3. Who thinks this way, exactly? Lists of prominent American Islamophobes are easy to generate, and I would rather not add another canon to the many now in circulation. For a concise and current naming of names, with a focus on the American punditocracy, one should consult the special report produced by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), a media watchdog, at www.smearcasting.com. To sample the Islamophobic discourse in its most well-developed academic forms, one should tour the Campus Watch website, http:// www.campus-watch.org/, where the common fixations of the genre are on full, unapologetic display. Run by Daniel Pipes, this site is dedicated to exposing anti-American, anti-Israeli bias among Middle East studies scholars. Scholars who propagate such bias are, by the standards of Campus Watch, very likely to be Islamophiles. 4. A sampling of this scholarship would include McAlister (2001), Chomsky (2003), Gregory (2004), Beinin (2003), Mamdani (2004), Lincoln (2006), and Asad (2007). In

22

Islamophobia / Islamophilia

discussing terrorism, these authors are never far from a critique of Islamophobia. The two topics are virtually inseparable. 5. The full statement can be viewed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4764730.stm. 6. Evelyn Alsultany (2007) catalogues recent public relations campaigns sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), showing how they play on positive imagery available to American Muslims in an attempt to improve the image of Islam in the United States. Many of the themes I have identified as Islamophilic are front and center in CAIR publicity. 7. The manner in which these imperial encounters were based on fundamental inequalities, yet were also collaborative, transforming colonizers and the colonized, is demonstrated with great sensitivity in Ussama Makdisi’s Artillery of Heaven (2008). This study of American Christian missionaries in nineteenth-century Lebanon/Syria contends with earlier forms of the Islamophobic and Islamophilic ideologies explored in this volume. 8. This sensibility is vividly on display in Bat Yeor’s Eurabia (2005). For a fresh historical account of the last historical period in which Muslim political powers could effectively invade Christian Europe as such, garnering territory and converting Christians to Islam, see Marc Baer’s Honored by the Glory of Islam (2008). The latter, with its sophisticated account of why and how Ottomans extended their domains into Christian realms, is especially useful in developing genealogies of Islamophobia in Europe; in many ways, it is the perfect complement to Mastnak’s essay in this volume, and his earlier study on the origins of the crusading movement in Latin Christendom (2002). 9. Needless to say, this model of the contemporary world contradicts the popular “clash of civilizations” imagery developed by Samuel Huntington (1996). One might argue that investment in civilizational models, and the idea of necessary civilizational clashes, is an intellectual attempt to hem in processes of transregional cultural interaction that have become too promiscuous. 10. For a disturbing meditation on the place of Islam in Europe, see Talal Asad’s “Muslims and European Identity” (2000). Written before the 9/11 attacks, this essay concludes that Muslims cannot be represented in Europe as Muslims under current regimes of citizenship, secular nationalism, and European identity. Asad’s position, read in the aftermath of 9/11, seems only to replicate the problems of representation it analyzes. Throughout North America and Europe, Muslim activists and intellectuals are now making vigorous, successful bids for national inclusion, as Muslims, in terms Asad’s analysis could not have foreseen. For one of the most challenging arguments in this new vein, see Tariq Ramadan (2005). 11. Examples of this generational revisionism are discussed in Naber (2005), Grewal (2009), and Ewing (2008). 12. For detailed accounts of how this process of discipline and inclusion can yield substantial political gains for Muslims, see Lara Deeb’s (2006) study of Hizbullah activism in Lebanon and Jenny White’s (2003) study of Islamist mobilizations in Turkey. How this process has unfolded among Arab Muslims in Detroit, in the years after 9/11, is described by Howell and Shryock (2003) and Howell and Jamal (2008).

Introduction

23

13. The unexpected success of Muslim political mobilization in the U.S. after 9/11 is charted in recent work by Bakalian and Bozorgmehr (2005). 14. Despite the market appeal of anti-religious manifestoes like Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (2007) or Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2008), such books have almost no policy-making potential, and as intellectual exercises, they are widely portrayed as the products of curmudgeonly minds. 15. This equation of historicism and political criticism with social justice is a common trope, and I see good reason to be skeptical. Secular academics, who believe religiously in history and its effects on the present, underestimate the advances that can be made by dispensing with the past. Movement beyond the politics of enemy and friend might require a prudent dose of tactical forgetting, or forgiveness.

Works Cited
Alsultany, Evelyn. 2007. “Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity through Non-Profit Advertising Post-9/11.” American Quarterly 59(3): 593–622. Asad, Talal. 2000. “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?” In Cultural Encounters: Representing “Otherness,” ed. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian Street, 11–27. London: Routledge. ———. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press. Baer, Marc. 2008. Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. Bakalian, Anny, and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. 2005. “Muslim American Mobilization.” Diaspora 14(1): 7–43. Bat Yeor. 2005. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Beinin, Joel. 2003. “Is Terrorism a Useful Term in Understanding the Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict?” Radical History Review 85: 12–33. Bowen, John. 2007. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Cesari, Jocelyne. 2002. “Islam in France: The Shaping of a Religious Minority.” In Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens, ed. Yvonne Haddad, 36–51. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Securitization and Religious Divides in Europe: Muslims in Western Europe after 9/11—Why the Term Islamophobia Is More a Predicament than an Explanation. A Challenge research project funded by the European Commission. http://www.libertysecurity.org/article1167.html. Chomsky, Noam. 2003. Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press. Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. 1997. Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. London: Runnymede Trust. Dannin, Robert. 2002. Black Pilgrimage to Islam. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Dawkins, Richard. 2008. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books. Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Ewing, Katharine Pratt, ed. 2008. Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States Since 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Grewal, Zareena. 2009. “Marriage in Colour: Race, Religion, and Spouse Selection in Four American Mosques.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(2): 323–45. Hitchens, Christopher. 2007. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books. Howell, Sally, and Amaney Jamal. 2008. “Detroit Exceptionalism and the Limits of Political Incorporation.” In Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States Since 9/11, ed. Katherine Pratt Ewing, 47–79. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Howell, Sally, and Andrew Shryock. 2003. “Cracking Down on Diaspora: Arab Detroit and America’s ‘War on Terror’.” Anthropological Quarterly 76(3): 443–62. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Jackson, Sherman. 2005. Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection. New York: Oxford University Press. Leonard, Karen Isakson. 2003. Muslims in the United States: The State of Research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lincoln, Bruce. 2006. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Makdisi, Ussma. 2008. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon Books. Mastnak, Tomaž. 2002. Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. Berkeley: University of California Press. McAlister, Melani. 2001. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000. Berkeley: University of California Press. Modood, Tariq. 2005. Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Naber, Nadine. 2005. “Muslim First, Arab Second: A Strategic Politics of Race and Gender.” The Muslim World 95(4): 479–95. Naber, Nadine, and Amaney Jamal, eds. 2008. Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Ramadan, Tariq. 2005. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward. 1981. Covering Islam. New York: Pantheon Books. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

and Islam is often portrayed as a serious threat to secularism. Those who could be described as “Islamophobes” do not correspond to a monolithic category. either. have equally divergent views of their faith.” and like other words in this family. or. The term is a close cousin of “xenophobia. These sentiments
29
. Today Islamophobia is a global phenomenon. it has proven useful in recent decades as transregional immigration and shifting national boundaries have produced political climates in which fearful. animosity toward Muslims is commonplace throughout Europe and North America. Despite the fact that multicultural pluralism and a general commitment to tolerance are central to the political self-image of the West. who can be secular in their outlook. the forms of Islamophobia that pervade international media and global political discourse tend to reflect the interests and anxieties of Western. relationships to difference are resurgent. Because the contemporary world system is dominated by Western states. Islam is hardly uniform. Islamophobia denotes hostility directed specifically at followers of Islam. As a target of hostility. and they cultivate this hostility in a diversity of cultural and political contexts. It is understood to be many things by non-Muslim observers. metropolitan societies. or democracy. on a far grander scale. at Muslims. several of whom colonized Muslim territories in the recent past and still dominate them today. or overtly antagonistic.1
Western Hostility toward Muslims: A History of the Present
Tomaž Mastnak
“Islamophobia” is a new word but not a new phenomenon. Whereas xenophobia signifies hostility toward a wide array of foreigners. to Western civilization itself (see introduction). They are hostile to Muslims for a variety of reasons. and Muslims themselves. or those perceived to be foreign.

30

Continuities and Transformations

did not emerge out of thin air, and the conflicts of the last decade, no matter how intense, are not sufficient to explain them. The ideological complex we now refer to as Islamophobia is rooted in far older traditions of hostility toward Muslims. These traditions have, over a span of centuries, shaped Latin Christianity and European identity in fundamental ways. The temporal depth, enduring tropes, and political tenacity of these traditions are the bedrock on which contemporary Islamophobia is built; even cultural trends that are conspicuously Islamophilic (that endorse a supportive, congenial relationship to Islam and Muslims) are colored by this legacy. A greater awareness of the antiquity and persistence of Western hostility toward Muslims is a necessary element of any political or intellectual agenda that hopes to overcome it.

I.
Deep-seated animosity toward Muslims was created at a particular moment in history. That moment coincided neither with the advent of Islam nor with the Muslim threat to, and incursions into, regions now called “the West.” Even a clear Muslim threat to Christian lands in the early Middle Ages did not trigger an all-embracing war. Islam and Christianity are not naturally, automatically, or necessarily inclined toward an all-consuming conflict. Muslim conquests in the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century, which followed repeated raids into southern Italy and Sicily in the preceding half century, were recorded by Latin Christians in the dry language of chronicles. But the religion of the invaders did not itself stir much curiosity. Some seventhand eighth-century Western pilgrims to the Holy Places did not even notice religious differences between Christians and Muslims, whom Latin Christians usually called Saracens.1 In the East, Christian polemics against the new religion seem to have appeared soon after Muslim conquests in the region, but only with John of Damascus (almost a century after Muhammad’s revelation) did this discourse cover the ground and take the form that would later become stock in trade in the West. When and how Eastern Christian polemics against Islam were transmitted to the West begs more research. In the lands where Christianity and Islam originated, the two religions appear to have peacefully coexisted in the early years of Islam. Travelogues by Western pilgrims give a picture of an apparently undisturbed Christian religious life. One can read reports that, in some cases, Christians and Saracens “shared a church.”2 When, in the seventh and eighth centuries, Muslims reached the European peninsula, Latin Christians saw them as one among

Western Hostility toward Muslims

31

many pagan, infidel, or barbarian enemies. Among this host, Muslims were assigned no privileged place. Western Christians saw neither Muslims nor Islam as a special threat to the Christian religion. The Latin Christians’ early response to Muslims was not friendly, but it was quite moderate in tone. Seventh- and eighth-century Merovingian chroniclers represented Saracen conquests as secular wars no different from the many other wars they recorded. Their Carolingian successors wrote of the anti-Saracen campaigns as an element in the Carolingians’ endeavors to strengthen their rule in what is today southern France. Neither the Muslim nor the Christian wars were seen as specifically religious wars. Christian scribes did not vilify Saracens and lacked interest in the invaders’ religion.3 Muslims played a relatively unimportant role in Carolingian portrayals of the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, and while the Carolingians occasionally waged wars against Muslims, they also maintained diplomatic relations with them. Christian views of Muslims began to shift in the mid–ninth century. One moment in that shift was the episode of the “martyrs of Córdoba.” In the 850s, Muslim authorities decapitated close to fifty Christians found guilty of blasphemy. Those Christians had publicly insulted Islam and reviled Muhammad. The Christian community was split in its reaction to these “martyrs.” On the one hand, Christian townsfolk of Córdoba pointed out that the Cordoban authorities had not persecuted the Christians. They refused to recognize their fanatical co-religionists as legitimate martyrs because they had “suffered at the hands of men who venerated both God and law.”4 On the other hand, the “martyrs” enjoyed support from the outlying monasteries. This extremist confrontation with Islam seems to have been an expression of anxiety over the loss of Christian identity. The walls the Muslim conquerors initially built to separate themselves from the Christians soon began to crumble. Assimilation and acculturation advanced in both directions, but especially toward Islam. Numerous Christians were employed in the public administration, immersed themselves in Arabic literature, and accumulated wealth in a prosperous commercial empire.5 In response to such appeasement, the “martyrs” and their apologists worked to affirm the exclusivity of Christianity. If one accepted that the “martyrs” were killed by men who “worship God” and have a valid “cult or law,” the apologists Eulogius and Alvarus asserted, “the strength of the Christian religion must necessarily be impaired.” In order to support their exclusivist claim and defend Christianity, the martyrs’ apologists attacked Muhammad as a “demoniac full of lies,” who could not speak the truth, as one “enveloped in fallacies,” who could not establish law, and as a “perverse grove,” unable to produce good fruit. As one who had formed

32

Continuities and Transformations

“a sect of novel superstition at the instigation of the devil,” Muhammad was called “heresiarch” and “antichrist.”6 The other impetus for the change in Christian views of Islam came from Rome. Faced with the military presence of the Saracens in southern Italy and with local Christians making alliances with the invaders, Pope John VIII (872–82) promoted a new, uncompromisingly hostile view of the Muslims and banned Christians from making alliances with them. He pictured the impia gens Saracenorum, hateful to God, as a grave danger to the Christian way of life.7 He pronounced that divine law prohibited any social links between the faithful and the unfaithful and, in particular, the crafting of treaties and alliances with the infidels. Those who made unclean alliances with Saracens acted against Christ himself.8 Even keeping peace with the “most evil” was a crime. The faithful, Pope John pronounced, had to desist from making peace with the enemies of God.9 In practice, John VIII’s efforts to break the “impious alliances” were unsuccessful. The two centuries that passed between John VIII’s papacy and the launching of the First Crusade saw continuing contacts between Christians and Muslims and lacked any clear focus on the latter as enemies. The monastic reform at the turn of the millennium, which radiated from Cluny, appears to have inspired some French monks to cross the Pyrenees in order to take possession of mosques or simply “to kill a Moor.”10 The eleventh-century Church reformers, especially Pope Leo IX (1049–54) and Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) and their polemicists, however, considered bad Christians their worst enemies—more detestable than Jews and pagans, among whom Saracens were hardly ever named. Neither did the imperial writers of the period regard Muslims as the enemy. In sum, before the end of the eleventh century, Christian animosity toward non-Christians was diffused. Muslims were not yet the chosen enemy people. In general, Latin Christians were indifferent to Muslim culture and religion, of which even the educated among them knew virtually nothing. They regarded Muslims as “only one of a large number of enemies threatening Christendom from every direction, and they had no interest in distinguishing the primitive idolatries of Northmen, Slavs, and Magyars from the monotheism of Islam, or the Manichean heresy from that of Mahomet,” and there appears to be little evidence that, before the launching of the First Crusade, “anyone in northern Europe had even heard the name of Mahomet.”11 A momentous change occurred with the Crusades. When Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095, he did not so much raise hostility toward Muslims, which had hitherto in the main been dormant in the Latin West,

Western Hostility toward Muslims

33

to new heights.12 Rather, he eliminated the ambiguities in Christian views of Muslims (which had characterized such a great figure of that age as Pope Gregory VII)13 and fixed the image of the Muslim as the focal point for Christian animosities. In his theology of history, Pope Urban saw his time as the age of confrontation with the Muslims: God fought the Muslims through the Christian soldiers. In a letter to Bishop Peter of Huesca, written during the First Crusade, Pope Urban said that God had “in our days with the help of Christian forces combated the Turks in Asia and Moors in Europe, and through special mercy restored to his worship once famous cities.”14 Christian military successes in Spain and the Orient were a turning point in redemptive history. Fighting Muslims, Christians found atonement with their God.15 At a point in history when Muslims presented no threat in any real terms to Christendom, Muslims became the enemy of Christianity and Christendom: their normative, fundamental, quintessential, universal enemy. They represented infidelity as such, the embodiment of evil and the personification of the very religion of the Antichrist. The Muslim world became no less than “the antithetical system, the social Antichrist.”16 Whereas, in fact, Christians had been on the offensive against Muslims in the Mediterranean for roughly a century, they still felt threatened and dislocated. Within the Latin West, anarchy was widespread, violence was endemic, the millenary of Christ’s birth and passion dominated mental horizons, and time was rife with eschatological, apocalyptic, and chiliastic fears and expectations.17 The clear-cut image of the Muslim enemy must have been a welcome response to the internal drama of Christendom, facing all the calamities of that age, accounting for its own sinfulness, searching for a public order, and hoping for salvation. Against the Muslim enemy, Christians could unite in peace. Their peace efforts, which had been under way for a century, could be enhanced and came to fruition in a God-willed war against Muslims, the sworn enemies of Christ’s name. With the Crusades, Christendom as a specific historical form of Latin Christian unity came of age.18 The construction of the Muslim enemy was an essential moment in the articulation of the self-awareness of the res publica christiana. The antagonistic difference between themselves and Muslims became at this crucial point a constitutive element of the Latin Christians’ collective identity. The work of that collective identity or, rather, that collective identity at work was the Crusade itself, the war against the fundamental enemy. The mobilization for and leadership of the Crusade was a powerful lever that helped to settle power struggles among the ruling orders of society and thus to define the contours of public order. The setting up of an internal order in Christian society and, among particular Christian entities, in Christendom was at the

34

Continuities and Transformations

same time the shaping of a global order. A defining trait of that global order was the fundamental unacceptability to Western Christians of the existence of the Muslims as Muslims.

II.
With the waning of the Middle Ages, one historical form of Western unity, Christendom, was succeeded by another: Europe. Roughly coinciding with that change, one image of the Muslim enemy, the Saracen, gave way to another: the Turk. What did not change was animosity toward Muslims. In fact, the establishment of the Muslim as the enemy, which was integral to the Crusades, was of direct relevance for the articulation of Europe as the new historical form of the broadest community of Western Christians. In response to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Latin Christian ecclesiastical and secular leaders and leading intellectuals drew on that heritage. They took over the symbolic figure of the Muslim enemy as the “reconciler of brethren.” They seized on fundamental animosity toward Muslims, forged during the First Crusade and cultivated over the next three centuries, and reformulated it in such a way that the sense of “us-ness” it invoked began to refer to the entity called Europe. Facing the Muslim enemy, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–64) asserted a fundamental unity of European culture. His illustrious career as a humanist man of letters and political man of action was crowned by his election as Pope Pius II in 1458. When Constantinople fell, Piccolomini was inspired to write of Greek culture as the well of Europe’s sciences and arts. The studies cultivated by the Latins were only rivulets flowing from the Greek spring. With the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, the stream of learning had been cut off; the spring of muses had dried up; Homer, other illustrious poets, and Plato had died a second death.19 Against the Turks as the enemies of both Greek and Latin culture, Europe appeared as a cultural whole. Against the Turks, Piccolomini represented Europe as a religious unity as well. Because Christians had fled and left victory to Maumeto, Christianity had been reduced to Europe, and Europe became identical with Christianity.20 As a geographically well-defined cultural and religious whole, Europe became the Christians’ homeland. Piccolomini warned his contemporaries that “we are persecuted by the enemy’s hand in Europe, on our own soil.”21 “In former times,” he continued, “we namely suffered damage in Asia and Africa, that is to say, in foreign lands; but now we are most badly struck in Europe, that is, in our patria, in our own home, in our dwelling-place.”22

The printers “kept the Turkish peril before the eyes of an ever-expanding reading public” not only by printing books and booklets (often containing vivid. was to “liberate Europe. Flavio Biondo.” In the “Turkish Calendar” for the year 1455.” Muslims were now seen as threats to the geographical integrity of Europe. religion. Nicolao Sagundino. the Muslim became the enemy of Europe. suggestive pictures of the “cruel Turk”) but also by publishing broadsides and newssheets (proto-newspapers). in the mid–fifteenth century. a humanist commonplace. which transformed Christendom into Europe and Latin Christians into Europeans. and Francesco Filelfo. Greece. the arena. had much to say on that account.” the mobilizing slogans were to “erase the Turkish name from Europe” and to “exterminate the Turk in Europe. so that none of them would be left alive “neither in Turkey. to its common culture.24 It is significant that the first German book printed by Gutenberg addressed the “Turkish question. the programmatic catchphrase of “chasing the Turk out of Europe” was recorded by chroniclers from Burgundy to the Czech lands and was duly taken up by writers of historical treatises dealing with the “Turkish question. They listened to the preaching of the crusade. The new printing press was mobilized to further the case of war against the Turks. Asia.” The vision of “driving the Turks out of Europe” was also embraced by the people.Western Hostility toward Muslims
35
When Europe became the reference point for the sense of “us-ness” directed against the Turk. its freedom.23 Europe was born under the aegis of cleansing. Orazio Romano. This “crusading commonplace”26 was the basis of numberless plans and projects for peace and unity in Europe. Andrea Contrario. and way of life. the verses for each month of the year called on a particular Christian prince or people to wage war against the Turks. and paid crusading taxes.” to “chase the Turk out of Europe. nor Europe. Along with “chasing the Turk out of Europe. The slogan of “chasing the Turk out of Europe” became.”25 The calls on Christians—and on Christian princes in particular—to end their quarrels and wars and join forces against the Muslims were abundant in Western Christian literature of the period. At the beginning of this literary genre stands the “Grand Design” of the Duke
. Panormita. Piccolomini was but one among many lay intellectuals and ecclesiastical men of power who participated in the militant birth of Europe. Poggio Bracciolini. and the goal—was accordingly nihilistic.” These formulae encapsulated intense intellectual developments. The Muslim was the existential enemy and action against him—of which Europe was the agent. The booklet closed with a prayer to the Lord. among others. On the fringes of the intellectual elite. beseeching him to help drive out the evil Turk and his people. The rallying cry. joined in daily prayers against the Turks.

The most influential of them. have crosscut religious. as such. Yet he approved of war against the Turks on more than defensive grounds alone. cultural. The ideas and attitudes that constitute the perpetual crusade. creating shared ground even among opponents and foes. whom he regarded as barbarians and called monstrous beasts.”28 Such perpetual war—I would call it a perpetual crusade—was a standard ingredient in the politics and political imagination of early modern Europe. and a people contaminated by all manner of crimes and ignominies. is famous for his apparently uncompromising rejection of war. A brief—and correspondingly simplified—overview of the ubiquity of antiMuslim attitudes in European intellectual and political history will substantiate these claims. justice. “would be a lesser evil than the present unholy conflicts and clashes between Christians. whom he saw as doing now what “Mahomete
. It is best to start with the Christian humanists. not an unqualified good. enemies of the Church. and particularly the whole coast of Africa. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466/69–1536). To a degree we should not underestimate. They have been voiced in different political languages across different historical periods. They are inseparable from cherished Western ideals of liberty.”29 He urged concord among Christian princes and employment of their arms against the Turks. into a perpetual war against the Infidels. Erasmus asked rhetorically.”31 He joined the choir calling for peace and concord among Christians so they could successfully fight the common enemy and defend God’s name. ideological. this perpetual crusade has framed Western policies and politics. “is this evil passion not let loose upon the Turks?” War against the Turks. They are part of what makes Western thought complex and. In his polemics against Luther. They belong to the same web of thought and imagery as those ideals.27 In Sully’s plan. and are reproduced by it. rights. in which Winston Churchill found inspiration for the integration of Europe in his day. and he wrote about their “high malice and hatred” and “incomparable cruelty.” why.36
Continuities and Transformations
of Sully. he argued. As a formative principle and imperative.30 Thomas More saw the Turks as representing the forces of darkness and Belial. as soon as Europe had been pacified. which is too near to our own territories for us not to be frequently incommoded by it.” The grand idea of the “Grand Design” was to “convert the continual wars among its several princes. peace. and humanity. written early in the seventeenth century. and ethnic divides among Christians. If human nature was “quite unable to carry on without wars. it was not shattered by deals and compromises made in practical politics. a European army was to chase “strangers” from Europe and conquer “such parts of Asia as were most commodiously situated.

“that it is not lefull to any crysten man to fight against ye Turke / or to make agaynst hym any resystence / thoughe he come in to crystendome with a grete army and laboure to destroy all. he argued. The “discovery” and colonization of America was. Columbus himself understood his “Indian enterprise” as a step towards the recovery of Jerusalem.Western Hostility toward Muslims
37
dyd before. conceived in the framework of a crusading imagination.32 In his own view. The only relation he could imagine with them was war. Instead of fighting each other for the handful of soil they could wrest from one another. gave much thought to Muslims.”34 Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540).” Such “comen warre which euery peple taketh in ye defence of theyr countre” and which every man fights “of a crysten charyte. there was “no reason to loke that crysten pryncys sholde suffer the catholyke crysten people to be oppressed by Turkys / or by heretykes worse than Turkys. In case of “necessyte agaynste the comen nature. The disputants shared a hostile view of the
. this was one among the Lutherans’ many heresies.”35 He went beyond imagining a liberation of European nations from the Turkish yoke. the youngest of the group. crush their power. Europeans should march against the Turks as a united Christian army.” man is allowed to defend himself as well as an innocent victim of invasion or oppression “by malyce.”33 More admitted that Christ and his holy apostles exhorted “euery manm to pacyence and sufferaunce / without requytynge of an euyll dede or making any defence / but vsyng further sufferaunce / and doynge also good for euyll. to a large degree.” was not “only excusable but also commendable. a Christian was to follow Moses rather than the gospel: “bothe nature / reason / and goddys byheste byndeth / fyrste the prynce to the sauegarde of hys peple with the parell of hym selfe / as he taught Moyses to know hym selfe bounden to kyll Egypcyans in the defence of Hebrewe / and after he byndeth euery man to the helpe & defence of his good & harmles neyghbour / agaynst the malyce and cruelty of the wronge doer.” War against the Turks was such a war par excellence: “Whych reason as it hath place in all batayle of defence / so hath it most especyally in the batayle by whyche we defende the crysten countrees agaynste the Turkys. The question of how the American natives were to be treated was decided on whether or not they were like the Turks.” In such cases. A case in point is the famous dispute between Las Casas and Sepúlveda.” For More. His writings were a reveille for Europe to unite against the Turk and to “rush with arms at the ready to destroy him. and take possession of the abundant land and wealth of Asia.” More took issue with Luther’s position (which Luther himself later abandoned). He thought of conquest.” Yet that “counsayll” was not absolutely binding.

” seriously. persecute Christians and work for the destruction of our faith.)39 On a more political level. The divisive question was who represented the “Turks” in Europe—that is. did not shake European views of the Turk. but drew opposite conclusions from that common ground. and abominable book that distorted Christianity even while it praised Jesus and Mary. Luther saw Turkish military successes in Europe as divine punishment for Christians’ sinful ways and. likewise. shameful. Luther questioned papal power. Mahmet.38 Because the “Turks or Saracens” took “that book of Mehmet. the Turk represented sin. as if the Indians were African Moors or Turks. in line with theologians from Salamanca.” since their belief in the Quran was a proof that they were deprived of “common human reason. but
. The Quran was a foul. consequently. He agreed with the conquest against “Moors from Africa. Las Casas. the Alcoran. “there should be no talk of conquest. It taught a disorderly doctrine of worldly government and commanded the Turks to plunder and murder. He soon changed his stance. whereas the pope was the “subtle devil” (subtile Teuffel). condemned clerical participation in warfare. To Protestants and Catholics alike. be treated differently—that is. he consequently objected to the crusade—war under the pope’s command. Turks. to devour and destroy everything around them.’”36 The Reformation.38
Continuities and Transformations
Muslims. who were “our Christian Turks” as opposed to the “Mohammedan Turks”—the Protestants or the Catholics?37 To be called a “Turk” by a Christian adversary was to be denounced as the enemy of Christ. peacefully.” But as to America. the Turkish Regiment was not a power ordained by God. and heretics who seize our lands. The Turks’ faith was scandalous. but only the preaching of the gospel of Christ ‘with gentle and divine words. Turks were servants of the devil and his instrument. absurd. they did not “deserve to be called human. the Prophet.” (But if they were human and did not lack reason. in which clerics took part and individuals looked for salvation. and their armies were the devil’s own. endeavored to prove that Amerindians were not Turks and should. For Luther. in his younger years. and believed in the Quran knowingly and willingly. was a son of the devil and the devil’s apostle. As such. Unlike other powers that be. and filthy. Sepúlveda extended European attitudes toward the Turks to the Indians and used arguments for war against Turks to justify war against Indians. argued against resistance to Turkish attacks. and rejected the efficacy of good works in the individual’s search for salvation. itself. or evil. Both Muhammad and the “Turkish emperor” were possessed by the devil. a wild people under whom the Christian faith could not survive. The distinction between him and the pope was that Mahmet was the “rude devil” (grobe Teuffel). they could not blame their perdition on anybody else.

was surprisingly conventional when it came to the “Turkish question.”42 When. understood very well that armed forces were of vital importance for defense and maintenance of the state. in his old age. for example. Christian and European unity against the Turks remained a central concern. His advice was to attack the Turks in their own land instead of sitting at home and waiting for them to come. the “Turkish question” was of grave concern to people all over Europe. war against the Turks. Campanella. for there will always be enough Turks.Western Hostility toward Muslims
39
he replaced crusades led by the pope and clerics with a war against the Turks (Türkenkrieg) conducted by lay princes.” Europe. broken by incessant wars and civil strife. and Saracens against whom war will always be just. if not desacralize. Whereas he considered war within Europe both scandalous and futile. he stated. The great philosopher Leibniz is a case in point. needed “one head” which would be an “effective force for religious unity.43 Later in the seventeenth century.40 Even when led by secular rulers. appeals for European unity against the Turks were frequent and crusading plans were many. a luminary of this new school. Moors. like Father Joseph (Richelieu’s éminence grise) and the Duke of Nevers. they gave considerable time and energy to thinking about a common European military enterprise against the Turks. And the best minds of Europe did not find it undignified to occupy themselves with the “Turkish threat” and war against the Turks. For men like Botero. for the well-being of all its subjects. By the time the Turks held Vienna under siege. leading figures of the second generation of new humanists. and for the struggle against the common enemy. Luther clearly declared his support for the Türkenkrieg—and accused the popes of never having seriously intended to fight the Turks. he regarded war against barbarian infidels as just. and it was discussed with real passion. in 1529. a Christian prince will always have a cause for war.41 The Protestants helped to secularize. and universally lawful. But like the Renaissance humanists before them. Ammirato. and he regarded war as the best means for eliminating evil spirits and diverting people from dangerous thoughts. Wishing to
. the great humanist thought obsessively about making a crusade. the Turks. justified. The new humanists of the late sixteenth century differed from their Renaissance predecessors in that they were inspired by the political realist Tacitus rather than the moralist Cicero. Justus Lipsius. it was gotseligen Krieg. The question for him was. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. against whom could arms be legitimately used? Luckily. and Francis Bacon. Botero. Men at the very center of European politics of the time. worked on preparations for a crusade. war against the Turks retained a godly character. he was not alone.

He came to the conclusion that it was advantageous. as Mahometans rézonables. convenient.45 As a European. he proposed the formation of a new Teutonic Order to fight the Türcken and other enemies. All that was false. required that the Turks be kept in their deep slumber of ignorance. for which he is mainly renowned.44 When. daily prayers.” His plan for European unity and peace.” the abbé “vowed a special aversion to the Muslim religion. and glorious for Christian sovereigns to go to war to “chase the Turk out of Europe and even out of Asia and Africa. deceiver. Leibniz argued.” “Utterly ignorant” as they were. as a patriot. and prevent war in Europe. was a plan for a general crusade. the Muslims would become “reasonable” and. the old and resigned philosopher wrote to Saint-Pierre that a remedy for the evil of wars disturbing Europe might be “to help the Emperor to chase the Turks out of Europe.”46 Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) was a famous name during his lifetime.”47 Saint-Pierre indeed believed that Mahometisme had been declining in proportion to the growth of “universal reason” among the Mohammedans. This conquest was urgent because it would preempt the reform of the Ottoman Empire that the sultan was about to undertake. fanatic.40
Continuities and Transformations
divert French aggression from the Netherlands. and incessant washing. As such. war against the Turks should be permanent. Europeans had to get rid of the illusion that “the Arabs are men like us. and incomprehensible in Islam—a religion founded by an impostor. The Muslims would be freed from the necessity of pilgrimages to Mecca. absurd. said Saint-Pierre.49 The imperative of keeping the Mohammedans in their place may be seen as Saint-Pierre’s guideline for solving the “Muslim question. They would be liberated from the prohibition against eating pork and drinking wine. and from their own religious intolerance. unceasing warfare.” The “speeding up of the annihilation of Mohammedanism” was “very much on his mind. obtain security for the German empire. Ideally. circumcision. for it was in Egypt that the Ottoman Empire was most vulnerable.48 But until that time. The common good of Christendom and security of Europe. Leibniz suggested to Louis XIV that he conquer Egypt.”50 Saint-Pierre’s European union
.” Saint-Pierre regarded Islam as “one of the greatest scourges of the human race” and wanted to “extirpate Mohammedanism. Leibniz worried about the decline of martial spirit among Germans. could be tolerated. they had to be put in their proper place. D’Alembert eulogized him as an “enemy of religious intolerance” and mentioned in the same breath that. obscure. The conquest of Egypt was of great strategic importance. as a “professed enemy of all the errors that debase and eat up the human race. and madman—was going to dissipate in the light of reason. fasting during Ramadan.

was an offspring of the revolution. of course. The conquest of Egypt.59 The French Revolution does not appear to have caused any drastic change in European attitudes toward the Muslim world. the French scholar and politician Volney tried to dissuade France from getting involved in the Russo-Turkish war.”52 Saint-Pierre thought of establishing “many new Christian sovereignties” on the ruins of the Turkish empire.” he said. were engaged in bringing each other to ruin. instead of destroying the common enemies. “they should be destroyed. “I wish.” and that “other peoples” might establish themselves where the Turks had lived. and a vicious one at that.” and he corresponded with the philosopher-king Frederick II about the hoped-for pleasure of seeing “the Muslims driven out of Europe. because “with their stupid fanaticism they perpetuate the contagion by renewing its germs.” Toward the end of his days the great Enlightenment philosopher seems to have felt that his life was not complete.”56 In a letter to Catherine II of Russia. a very old idea. from Europe) and the gradual formation of a “great society” of humankind. It was a first step in the process
.” The Turks had. Voltaire confided in unequivocal terms: “Overcome the Turks. The crusading spirit was not alien to the Age of Reason.” he wrote to the czarina. along with the plague. But Volney did not argue against antiTurkish war as such.”51 The great objective of this enlightened crusade was “the conquest of everything that the Turks possess in Europe and on the Mediterranean islands. the greatest curse on earth.” But Volney expected that other powers than France would do the job. He wanted to annihilate them. to be “chased out of Europe. the very symbol of the Enlightenment.”57 In 1788. and I will die content.Western Hostility toward Muslims
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was a device for “making the way to a universal crusade. ten years after Voltaire’s death and a year before the revolution. A man of a new age. of course.58 But Volney saw Asian despotism as an impediment to the improvement of the human race and considered the Ottoman “barbarians” a plague. incomparably more solid and better concerted than all the previous. “It does not suffice to humiliate them. He wrote that the Turks were. in Asia and Africa. Russia had a prominent role to play here.”54 Saint-Pierre was neither eccentric nor anachronistic. that there was more he could have done. “I had at least been able to help you kill a few Turcs. Volney was happy to imagine Catherine II becoming “the empress of Constantinople and restorer of the Greek Empire.53 and he defined European union and peace as “the only means for making Europe and the European order [la police Europaine] reign in all parts of the world. is a vivid example of this ethos.”55 He deplored the fact that “the Christian powers. he reflected on the universalization of civilization (radiating. Voltaire.

linked in one way or another to the relations between the West and the Muslim world. he suggested. was declared on September 16. would bring three-quarters of the world’s Muslim population under European domination.61 When in our own day it comes to grappling with actual and looming political disasters. A new crusade. irenism. a great French historian of the crusades was inspired to describe. there appear a set of figures who are said to have been peacefully and lovingly disposed to the Muslims. by the descendants of King Richard under the command of Marshal Allenby. opponents of the shedding of blood. in about a century. The French historian was mistaken only in his belief that the Crusades were finally accomplished. in a book written for a popular audience. and ecumenicalism. Islamophobia is the dominant Western tradition. 1917. As to Jerusalem.”60 If this is not irreproachable historiography. In fact. still well under way. proponents of dialogue. I want to conclude this paper with a note on Islamophilia.
III. throughout the centuries I have described here. Some of them are represented as critics of the Crusades. Beirut.42
Continuities and Transformations
that. Islamophilia has always been marginal and full of contradictions. 2001. The Middle East had to be recovered again in our own day. Next to Islamophobia. I have shown elsewhere that there are clear limits to their criticism. When it comes to the Muslims and their world. and Tyre. the “Franks” set foot in Syria again in order. juxtaposed to their
. it is a realistic political judgment. it is the Islamophobic tradition that is of greatest consequence for us. to “deliver Tripoli. French and English machinations in the Middle East as a replay of the old crusades. the city of Philip de Montfort.
My narrative so far has dealt with Western animosity toward Muslims. The focus can easily be justified. the city of John of Ibelin. Its realism lies in understanding the presence and power of the crusading spirit in our lives. we are living with the consequences of that apparent final triumph. which apparently want to give us hope by playing down the uglier aspects of that tradition. four years later. In 1914. After rivalries among the European powers had already brought about a world war.62 Moreover. In benevolent accounts of the Western tradition of Christian-Muslim relations. the city of Raymond of Saint-Gilles. and advocates of coexistence between the followers of Christianity and Islam. it was to be ‘reoccupied’ on December 9. as minorities. even though Christians lived securely in Muslim domains.

who observe the law of that one who is called Mahumeth . St. a great man of early-twelfth-century Christendom. . in the hope of converting Muslims. A case in point is Raphael Patai’s book The Arab Mind. a Franciscan tertiary who lived into the second decade of the fourteenth century. he devised a scientific scheme to use burning mirrors to destroy the enemy without blood being spilled. Roger Bacon. however. If such persuasion failed. whom I see as practitioners of certain brands of Orientalism. he would rely on the sword. in analyzing the Arab character. a tradition rich in phobic and philic approaches to Islam. declared that he preferred preaching. His Franciscan brethren did their own share of abusing Islam. since God endowed men with reason. not human. This is how he described his book when he had just finished it: “Seriously though. I occasionally deviate from strict objectivity. considered the Muslims a defect in the structure of the universe. Père Joseph was later to sing of “Francia. he helped organize the Second Crusade. that the Muslim doctrine was the “foremost error of errors. it is in the
. Patai’s case shows how thin the line between philia and phobia can be.”64 Ultimately. I want to place my focus on today’s torturers.” the “dregs of all the heresies into which all the remnants of the diabolical doctrine have flown together. one of the order. as such. He abhorred the shedding of blood.Western Hostility toward Muslims
43
Islamophilic utterances and gestures. I am convinced that if. which came into existence since the very coming of the Saviour.65 Raimundus Lullus. that Islam was unreasonable. Therefore. who lived in the thirteenth century. . Peter the Venerable. in case preaching to Muslims had no success. one detects more conventional Islamophobic attitudes. to killing them. It has been allotted a place of honor in the genealogy of torture methods to which Muslim suspects are subjected in our contemporary global gulag. Franciscus” as “fatalia nomina Turcis. he set out to prove. but in love. or even as a (perhaps suppressed) part of them. Francis is often praised for choosing to address the Egyptian sultan with words rather than swords. bringing to the infidel prince the divine truth. not in hatred. In the end.66 This much admired Majorcan “doctor of mission” thought out methods of convincing them of the truth of Christianity that remind me of the “sensory overload” employed by today’s torturers.”67 Leaving aside Platonic Orientalism. But he approved of crusading.”63 He concluded. from which it followed that Muslims were not reasonable and were. which has acquired great notoriety since Abu Ghraib. Let me cite just a few examples. wrote many a kind word about approaching “the sons of Ishmael. These indispensable experts in what is marketed as “the war on terror” draw part of their expertise from Orientalist insights. as did so many Christian polemicists.

My two closest friends. both Muslim and Christian civilizations are civilizations of love. After its inception and until our ways parted (December 2006–August 2007). who had promised in his 2004 election campaign to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. which is on offer. the binary nature of
. there are numerous efforts and initiatives to de-escalate the tensions. popular at least since Hans Prutz’s Cultural History of the Crusades 70 and standard fare for those who want to portray Islam in a positive light for Western audiences today. which generate it. I am glad that you are similarly attached. I was the director of the Secretariat of the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations initiative. So I have a love and sympathy with Arabs especially the medieval ones who civilized S. like most of us English gentry.” the Muslim law.44
Continuities and Transformations
direction of a romantic sympathy with the Arabs which has been with me ever since my early youth. with whom he had written a book on Hebrew myths (which added hardly anything new to Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews). The originator of the initiative was Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. as well as deeds and actions on the level of civil society. via Edward III and Spanish Alfonso line). Ultimately. the longing for those “wilder shores of love” that lay beyond the sea. which is easier to be loved by non-Muslims in the West because of its mysticism and the corresponding emphasis on the inner experience of the divine rather than on shari‘ah—the “outer path. Europe and introduced the romantic love-motif. Graves established blood relations between the Prophet. English gentry. Graves. In the very personal preface I wrote to the book I tried to show the various roots of this incurable Arabophilism. is a result of politics and policies. a prolific English writer. are in direct senior descent from the Prophet (from whom I am also descended. responded in kind: “I hope your Arab Mind is successful. As the object of his philia he chose Sufism. With the adoption of the initiative by the United Nations. By an unexpected twist of fate. Sufis. which is as a rule popularly understood to be a clash between the West and the Islamic world. The motif common to the times between Walter Scott and Robert Graves was that of love.”69 Graves translated Patai’s Islamophilia with an ethnic turn into Islamophilia proper. as exemplified by Saladin. Today. I happen to know one of these projects from the inside. Why.”68 Patai sent these words to Robert Graves. Instead of common religious descent from Abraham. he would certainly have added chivalry. then. and himself. including the Queen. And he did not forget our debt to the Arabs for the “romantic love-motif. He picked up the idea of Muslim cultural and scientific—civilizational—influences on the backward Europe of the Middle Ages.” Had he lived a century earlier. should there be a clash of civilizations? The clash of civilizations.

a body of dignitaries who. Any shaking of that assumption was duly resisted. had to report to the U. It is hardly coincidence that these two countries were historically the site of intense Muslim-Christian conflict.Western Hostility toward Muslims
45
the conflict the initiative was meant to address was built into the structure of the initiative itself. or absent modernization in the Muslim world at large. was predominantly understood to be Islamic extremism). the initiative at moments seemed to lack the passion needed to come to the root of the problem. secretary-general and present a package of “practical measures” to counter the rise of extremism (which. part of the raison d’être of the Alliance of Civilizations initiative was to provide a raison d’être for some very important persons temporarily out of very important positions. An extreme example of this tendency was the refusal to use statistical data on perceptions of the West in Muslim countries gathered by a prominent polling organization from the United States. The members of that group.N. it seems fair to say that the initiative’s main expressed concern turned out to be the threat of Islam. were chosen so as to give equal representation to the “West” and the “Islamic world. and that both have a vexed relationship to Europe and to modernity. At the highest levels of the initiative it was generally assumed that the problem was known and its nature understood. or in Muslim regions where
. so the de facto division of the High-Level Group became the Islamic world and the rest of the world. Started by a Christian country. The Islamic world was represented exclusively by secular and moderate Muslims. Unfortunately. Turkey. a place and a quality to which Spain and Turkey are widely believed to be marginal.” Like any high-level political initiative. failed. which had to represent the global community. Spain. The alliance was beset by prejudicial assumptions about belated. As such. especially variants of Islam that were not subservient to current notions of moderation or subsumable in nostalgia for the declining Muslim secular elites. this threatening Other had no voice in the “alliance of civilizations. As with much older Christian polemics against Jews and Muslims. On more than one occasion this intellectual resistance led to accepting current ideas and images of what had gone wrong in our world and to adopting terms of discussion favored in the metropolitan West and among Muslim secular elites.” The West was a chimerical notion that resisted neat translation into a formal structure. The new bloc division of the alliance was then reproduced in the High-Level Group. these terms are a key part of the problem the initiative was supposed to be addressing. as well as long periods of peaceful coexistence. before the year was over. the initiative had to be co-sponsored by a Muslim one.71 Despite many good intentions. the former outnumbering the latter. which it had the mission to help solve. by tacit agreement.

is its best remedy. The unspoken understanding of the Alliance of Civilizations was that the problem with the “clash of civilizations” lay in the “clash. a worthwhile effort chained itself to a dichotomizing notion. and exploitation on the other. Linked to these sentiments was the belief that poverty is the root cause of Islamic radicalism and economic development. But this message served only to reinforce the presupposition it was meant to undermine: that Islam is characterized by a special relationship to violence. Another prodigious obstacle on our path was the very idea of an “alliance of civilizations.46
Continuities and Transformations
extremism was most widespread. The intended message was. the Alliance of Civilizations. that label was made in response to the “clash of civilizations. Western.” Clearly.” But the substance of the response was never clearly articulated. It chose instead to beat its shadow. largely because there is little clarity at the basic level of social and political analysis about what “civilization” is. along with Western civilization. and exploited have often been Muslims. a secularist intellectual from a North African country explained that the problem with Islamists is that they are “alien to modern thought. there still remain problems with the very notion of civilization. of course. the subjugated. a concept loaded with racist and supremacist ideas on one side and painful experiences of colonial subjugation. humiliated. civilization. the alliance effectively granted the title of civilization to the Muslim world. By refusing to place these ideas in the historical contexts that produced them. By focusing on the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. and modern. economistic assumptions was the forthright denial that religion has anything to do with hatred or violence. On one occasion. implying that. A steady complement to these progressive. that Islam is not to be generally blamed for the proclamations and deeds of Muslim extremists.
. it is a key element in the tradition of Christian and Western Islamophobia. the problem lies in “civilization. it is a political and cultural complex of enduring global significance.” in how we conceptualize the “civilizations” at stake. humiliation. refused to confront Islamophobia head-on. If one pretends that colonialism is water under the bridge. This presupposition has deep historical roots. That decision was a tribute to Islamophobia and a lost chance to engage seriously with the explosive cocktail of religion and politics in our own time. pensée moderne” (in addition to being recruited from outside the traditional political and cultural elites).72 In some respects. and especially violence that threatens societies seen as Christian. therefore.” In fact. In effect. that was an achievement. But it was an achievement that will guarantee the dragging on of a clash whose long history lives actively in our present. at its highest organizational level. In recent centuries. especially to violence against non-Muslims.

and placed bells in the main tower so that the Christians could be called to worship.” reprinted in Löwith (1969). 3. At his harshest. 2. See Landes (1995: 14–15). 19. Liber apologeticus martyrum 17–19.” De rebus Hispaniae VI. of the chief mosque of Toledo. To Cusa. 656). 6. 1453. cf. See Mastnak (2002: 79 ff). 15. entered the mosque with the support of Christian troops “and having purged it of the filth of Muhammad [spurcitia Mahometi]. in agreement with Alfonso’s French wife. When the king was away.
. Cf. Indiculus luminosus 23–24. 504). [supposedly] July 12. Eulogius. cited in Smith (1988: 88–89). and persecuting humanist studies. 21. The charge of nihilism against Schmitt’s politics was first raised by Karl Löwith in his 1935 essay. where one can find hostile characterizations of Saracens. 23.Western Hostility toward Muslims
47
Notes
1. 5. Cf. 212). see Oratio Eneae de Constantinopolitana Clade. cited in Wolf (2000: 98–99). set up an altar of the Christian faith. 22. in John VIII (1844–64: cols. See Rotter (1986). 9. in Piccolomini (1909–18: 200. Wolf (2000: 92–93). there is no clear-cut image of Muslims as the focus of Christian hostility. Letter to Bishop Peter of Huesca. “Der okkasionelle Dezisionismus von C. 10. 12. 11. 28). 17. Vismara (1974: 13). Schmitt. given over to loose living. in John VIII (1844–64: col. Salernitans. John to Neapolitans. Piccolomini (1909–18: 201. oxen. I am aware of the Schmittian connotations. 14. Alvarus. Liber apologeticus martyrum 12. 16. Even in Bede’s biblical exegesis. in 1085. John VIII (1844–64: col. Bede was not rancorous. and Amalfitans. a monk from Cluny. A notorious case was the seizure. 1453. eating horse meat. France (1996: 56). Piccolomini to Cusa. [supposedly] July 21. in Urban II (1844–64: col. and vultures. to Nicholas V. 13. See Rupp (1939). 20. See John to Emperor Charles the Bald. 696–97). p. 24. Eulogius. Patzelt (1978: 199). Cardini (1992: 396). the continued use of which had been guaranteed to the Muslims under terms of the town’s capitulation to King Alfonso IV. 8. ad 875. ad 876. Piccolomini ([1551 (1967)]: 678). 7. July 21. 4. cited in Wolf (2000: 96). 18. & bello contra Turcos (Piccolomini [1551 (1967)]: 681). Manselli (1965: 136). May 11. Bernard de Sédirac. 1453 (Piccolomini [1909–18]: 211). 1098. Becker (1988: 348–49). Becker (1988: 366–67). 209–10). Southern (1962: 14–15. On the cultureless Turks. hating sciences. 655).

2
The Khalil Gibran International Academy: Diasporic Confrontations with an Emerging Islamophobia
Naamah Paley
Reactions to the establishment of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA). and as such it was a focus of general concern. are discouraged and persistently thwarted. which was targeted for its associations with a language and an identity that.. Over the summer of 2007. by supporting parties to a foreign conflict that 53
. were intense. drawing considerable media attention. part of the public space funded by city resources. in the minds of many Americans. The conflict over KGIA assumed national significance because it unfolded in New York City.” in the Middle East. and “there.” in the U. Arab-Jewish relations in New York are fundamentally shaped by the Arab-Israeli conflict. As in other American cities. most influential Jewish communities. and attacks against KGIA and her leadership can be seen as part of an emerging Islamophobia. Debbie Almontaser. was all too easily associated with negative stereotypes of the “Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim Other” (Naber 2006: 236). Because dual-language and culturally specialized schools have succeeded across the nation. an observant Muslim who wears the hijab. The school was to be public. are stigmatized and highly suspect. Debbie Almontaser. became lightning rods in local and national Arab American and Jewish communities. it is important to understand hostile responses to the KGIA. Home to one of the world’s largest. Both communities locate themselves “here.S. the first New York City public school to teach an Arabic dual curriculum with a focus on Arab history and culture. New York is an urban setting in which overt Arab identities. expressed publicly through pan-Arab nationalism and support for Palestinian statehood. KGIA and its principal.

S. Although I tried to be neutral and fair. collaborating with Jewish organizations made Debbie Almontaser the recipient of vocal criticism from within her own community. I interned with Debbie Almontaser at KGIA. and I worked primarily out of the Jewish Federation office in the external relations department. and I was expected to provide them with a report about the school. Since I am interested in both Arabic and education. My delicate role allowed me to bal-
. sponsored by the largest American Jewish campus organization. including the enrollment process. Egypt. From June through August of 2007.54
Continuities and Transformations
has become a central component of their diasporic identities. I was asked to represent KGIA and defend it to the mainstream Jewish public. as the borderless “war on terror” persists. Understanding why the school attracted mostly negative attention instead will provide critical insight into how Arab and Muslim Americans are denied normative status in the U. KGIA. and from interviews I conducted with community and staff members during the following fall and winter. people realized that the success of KGIA would be an important opportunity for Arab Americans in New York City to generate positive attention and public support. working on a number of initiatives. On all sides of the contest.
My Role and Research Methods
I became personally involved with the Khalil Gibran International Academy after reading about it in early 2007 during my junior year abroad in Cairo. for example. I met with various Jewish leaders who work with the Arab American and Muslim American communities. they set new guidelines for determining their distinctly American selves. In this role. accordingly. This test was applied with similar results in the Arab American community.1 My research is drawn from this period. In October. I spoke on Almontaser’s behalf at a rally on the steps of City Hall in the aftermath of the summer controversies. I did view myself as a representative of the Jewish community. While I did not see myself as a spy. but these selves cannot be entirely divorced from images of a Jewish or Arab Other who is considered a potential threat. served as a litmus test for New York’s Jewish community: whether a Jewish group or leader chose to support or criticize Almontaser and the school gave them a clearly defined place on the spectrum of Jewish organizations. this school presented an ideal opportunity. As Arabs and Jews renegotiate these identities in American society. Funding for my summer came from a Hillel internship. I was certainly an insider asked to respond to the controversies and questions at hand. As KGIA represented a complicated set of issues.

was a renowned Lebanese Christian immigrant.”4 In 2007. Khalil Gibran. should. a Jewish neoconservative historian and analyst.
Case Study: The Khalil Gibran International Academy
In understanding. and began to solicit support from Brooklyn’s Arab American population. and author of The Prophet. some leaders from the Muslim Arab community felt that naming the school after a Christian was a defense mechanism designed to avoid the Muslim connotations of an Arab school.”3 The namesake of the school. for his involvement with the Middle East Forum and Campus Watch—both watchdog organizations dedicated to “fighting radical Islam” and “protecting Americans and their allies. Some community members argued that they should not have to defend themselves or name the school after Khalil Gibran. began documenting and criticizing KGIA in the right-of-center newspaper the New York Sun. KGIA partnered with the Arab American Family Support Center. Pipes has made himself known. The New Visions proposal stressed the multicultural perspective of the school: “New York is a microcosm of the world. And. represent a milestone for both the Arab American and Muslim American communities. is the perfect site for KGIA. —Khalil Gibran
In February 2007. particularly throughout the Jewish community. they believed. As the KGIA gained publicity in April 2007. controversy erupted in response to Almontaser and her efforts. however. a school led by a woman who publicly wears the hijab. Daniel Pipes. as one of the most diverse boroughs in the nation and home to one of the oldest Arab communities in America. The intent was to provide New York City’s youth with “the opportunity to expand their horizons and be global citizens. a Yemeni American Muslim educator who had worked to build ties with Christian and Jewish communities.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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ance the components of my identity as needed and as benefited me—and the several parties I represented—in varying situations. recognizable face for the school.”2 The school was awarded a grant from New Visions for Public Schools and invited to join a small group of community-based schools. poet. KGIA. The school was to be led by Debbie Almontaser. Although a Christian Arab is more representative of New York’s communal demographics. a social service agency. a number of local and national media outlets based in New York City announced the establishment of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA). Brooklyn. all walls shall fall down. supported Gibran as a model Arab American and a positive. he
. Most community people.

an argument that proved convincing to the general public as opposition to the school increased. 2007.” and “What’s Arabic for ‘Shut It Down.’” It was implied that Almontaser had taken this opportunity to condone. adding the phrase ‘a. I don’t believe the intention is to have any of that kind of [violence] in New York City. and a number of threatening verbal assaults. .8 This loose connection led to a media storm. The clarifying comment she made during her interview was strategically left out: “I understand it is developing a negative connotation due to the uprising in the Palestinian-Israeli areas. and shaking off oppression. . chancellor of New York City’s schools. .”6 The coalition website asked Joel Klein.” Pipes and his supporters founded the Stop the Madrassa Coalition. which is the contentious point in New York City.’ That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic. Debbie. the Palestinian Intifada. to “keep your promise . On August 6.” She said the T-shirts were “pretty much an opportunity for girls to express that they are part of New York City society . When asked about the meaning of the word intifada.k. using the Arabic term madrassa. accused Almontaser of condoning T-shirts that read “Intifada NYC.’ treating her chosen name as a sort of criminal alias. Now. rather than condemn.”9 With this statement. an initiative that reached two hundred American college campuses. . a local tabloid. held anti-American views.”7 Arab identity and American patriotism were painted as two poles in opposition to one another. which was later published in alternate news sources. a group that had once shared an office space with the Saba Association of American Yemenis. Almontaser considered this translation when naming the school and decided to use the word “academy” (akademiyya) rather than “school” (madrasa) for exactly this reason. .56
Continuities and Transformations
also founded Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Dhabah.”5 He claimed that Debbie Almontaser was a 9/11 denier. shut down the Khalil Gibran International Academy. In his article “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn. “the better to render her alien . Almontaser was forced to resign her position as founding principal
.” Following this interview.a. Almontaser stated: “The word basically means ‘shaking off. for which Almontaser is a board member.” The shirts had been produced two years earlier by members of Arab Women Active in Art and Media (AWAAM). countless articles. newspaper headlines included “Intifada Principal.” Pipes wrote that “Arabic language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage. . and had called President Bush a “nightmare. Critics also identified Almontaser by her Arabic first name.10 After several days. which is widely associated among English-speakers with the training of Muslim extremists. to further instill a sense of fear in the public. the Arabic word intifada was separated from the Palestinian political activism captured by the Intifada. the New York Post.

Instead of debunking the misapprehensions about the school. another non-Muslim and non-Arabic speaker. Almontaser’s case gained attention across the city as coalitions formed both in support of and in opposition to her efforts. 2001. Activists organized Communities in Support of KGIA (CSKGIA). Danielle Salzberg. Daniel Pipes did manage to successfully instill fear in both the Jewish and general public of New York City. Throughout the 2007–2008 school year. a Jewish representative from New Visions who had worked with the school in a limited capacity. were Jews who believed it was their duty to reclaim the Jewish voice from its increasingly anti-Arab reputation. the president of the United Federation of Teachers.” Conflict around KGIA’s intentions instantly translated into a Jewish-Arab controversy as an Arab public school seemed brazenly to trespass on Jewish space.” She further claimed that Almontaser “was becoming a lightning rod. Almontaser was quickly replaced by an interim principal. She is a specialist in multicultural education and has been employed by the Department of Education for nearly twenty years.13
Debbie Almontaser has long been in the public eye. particularly since September 11. Headlines included “Jew-Turn” and “Hebrew haha. wrote that “the word ‘intifada’ is something that ought to be denounced. not explained away.”11 As I read letters to the editor published in various local and national newspapers and blogs following the initial attacks on Almontaser.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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of KGIA. whose goal was to reinstate Almontaser as KGIA’s principal. Randi Weingarten. who remains the school’s principal. Many of its leaders. both representing efforts to bring the Arab and Muslim voice into the public
. co-founding the September 11th Curriculum Project.12 Ms. all she did was confirm them. Salzberg was later replaced by Holly Reichert. and coordinating Arab American Heritage Week in New York City. supportive statements were extremely rare.
The KGIA Community: Partners and Allies
Our community will extend beyond the walls of the school. as both an Arab and a Muslim. The media seized the opportunity to write about an allegedly Zionist principal taking over an Arab school. including Almontaser’s lawyer and CSKGIA’s main organizer. While their efforts must be recognized. whose greatest concern was that their tax dollars would be spent on a terrorist training camp disguised as a public school. Her efforts have included facilitating workshops on Arab culture and Islam. She co-designed and developed curricula entitled (Re)embracing Diversity in NYC Public Schools: Educational Outreach for Muslim Sensitivity and Arab Peoples: Past and Present.

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education system. She belongs to mainstream Arab American organizations like Women in Islam and maintains positive ties to the Jewish community through the Dialogue Project and a number of joint projects with prominent Jewish organizations. In conjunction with her impressive credentials, she also represents a “safe” Arab American community member: a religious Yemeni Muslim raised in America. Her loyalty to the United States was apparent: her son, an Army Reserve officer, served as a rescue worker at “ground zero” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, illustrating his family’s commitment to American values and nationalism. When developing KGIA, Debbie Almontaser was careful to establish a safety network that she believed would protect and support the school. Early suspicions of KGIA centered on the belief that it would send an Islamic message to its students, so Almontaser formed an advisory board of interfaith religious leaders in the spring of 2007 that consisted of rabbis, pastors, and imams. The rabbis emphasized that they knew KGIA was not a religious school and that they did not join the board to encourage interfaith connections. Although Almontaser intended the board to serve as guardians and allies of the school, this strategy ultimately backfired. Critics used the creation of the board as an excuse to investigate board members and hold Almontaser responsible for any of their questionable comments. Stop the Madrassa declared one of the board’s imams to be a radical jihadist, citing his mosque’s website as proof. Because this imam was a prison chaplain, Stop the Madrassa members claimed that he contributed to “radicalization and recruitment in U.S. prisons,” and that, consequently, “we soon will see KGIA students in combat fatigues emblazoned with patches picturing the sword of Islam.”14 They demanded a response from Mayor Bloomberg, questioning why a man of this background, who “attempts to undermine basic American beliefs and traditions,” was sitting on KGIA’s advisory board.15 This guilt-by-association tactic was employed throughout the summer to undermine KGIA. Almontaser and supporters believed that KGIA would not be subject to accusations that it was an extremist madrassa if the school was clearly situated within the public realm. In response to mounting anxieties, Chancellor Joel Klein promised that “if any school became a religious school . . . or it became a national school . . . I would shut it down.”16 Almontaser’s past experience in the public school system should have guaranteed credibility, but the Department of Education’s support provoked concern instead. The most commonly uttered phrase was, “Is this where my tax dollars are going?” Concerned New Yorkers felt that, because the school was public, they held a degree of ownership in it. Suddenly, there was an Arabic or potentially “Islamist” school opening in their

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neighborhood, on their streets, with their money. Vocal non-Arab and nonMuslim critics feared the label “community-based school,” refusing to accept that KGIA belonged on their turf or could ever be part of their community.

Critique and Fear: Defining the “Hatemongers”
Just think, instead of jocks, cheerleaders and nerds, there’s going to be the Taliban hanging out on the history hall, Al Qaeda hanging out by the gym, and Palestinians hanging out in the science labs. Hamas and Hezbollah studies will be the prerequisite classes for Iranian physics. Maybe in gym they’ll learn how to wire their bomb vests and they’ll convert the football field to a terrorist training camp. —Unidentified blogger in The New York Times17

Because public schools in other parts of the country, particularly in Virginia’s Fairfax County and in Dearborn, Michigan, have long offered Arabic as an accredited foreign language, I began to investigate a critical question: “Why not in New York?”18 Why, in New York, did this school come under such intense scrutiny? It was widely believed that the school was treading on sensitive ground, on Jewish space. Although not all criticism of KGIA originated among Jews or Zionists, Jewish fear of Arab Americans was a theme constantly reinforced among those who followed the controversy. The actual composition of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, the campaign against KGIA, remains unclear. Although Daniel Pipes eventually admitted his participation, as did one of his (non-Jewish) colleagues, the remainder of the campaign’s advocates never revealed their true names.19 The impact of 9/11, too, must be recognized. According to Louis Cristillo, coordinator of the Muslims in New York City Project, “with New York City being Ground Zero, this is all a reflection of 9/11.”20 As a result of terrorist attacks committed by a small group of Arabs, Arab Americans as a collective are now held accountable. Debbie Almontaser experienced this reality; notwithstanding debate within her community about how to commemorate the second anniversary of 9/11, she was active in the planning of both a local candlelight vigil and a candlelight march, although she feared such programming might incite hate crimes.21 Even with a figure like Almontaser in the leadership of KGIA, Daniel Pipes relentlessly portrayed the school as an extremist breeding ground, stoking fear of terrorism and anti-Israel activity. The latter threats, he believed, are inevitable results of studying Arabic and gaining sympathy for the Arab world. According to James Coffman, as cited by Pipes: “Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamic movement and greater mistrust of the

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West.”22 In this view, studying Arabic increases the likelihood that students will become terrorists or join anti-American Islamic movements. Whatever their motivation, those who attacked Debbie Almontaser and opposed KGIA employed a familiar strategy. David Cole outlines what he believes to be the McCarthyist tactics now being exercised against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans as features of the “war on terror.” Organizations like Campus Watch, the David Project, and FrontPage Magazine, among others, target new enemies for our era: “Muslims, Arabs and others in the Middle East field who are identified as stepping over an unstated line in criticizing Israel.”23 These organizations, according to Cole (2003: 2), implemented historically McCarthyist techniques such as censoring subversive speech and assuming guilt by association. Pipes was aware of his methods, and he eventually confessed that the “T-shirts’ call for a Palestinian Arab-style uprising in the five boroughs, admittedly, had only the most tenuous connection to Ms. Almontaser.”24 Pipes’s confession begs the question: Why did critics of KGIA view the school as a threat deserving this method of attack?

Sharing Disputed Space
Where space must be shared, conflicts are likely to multiply. —Suzanne Keller, Community

The conflict over the establishment of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a school designed to foster Arab American identity in New York City, arose from a reluctance to share space with a group whose identity is perceived to be oppositional to one’s own. The people most likely to feel this way were antagonistic members of the American Jewish community, who feared official endorsement of a narrative of Arab American and Muslim American identity that would overlap with, and infringe on, their previously claimed space. America is essentially a microcosm of the modern world, where “diaspora runs with, and not against, the grain of identity, movement, and reproduction” (Appadurai 1996: 171). Consequently, America serves as a staging ground for diaspora communities to participate in conflicts that are otherwise located abroad. In this process, communities attempt to carve out ownership over actual public, American, non-diasporic spaces and resources; to “superimpose a place on an existing place” (Lees 2006: 194). Edward Said offers his insight into the general, but often Jewish, fear of Arabs staking claims to territory in public space: “If the Arab occupies space enough for attention, it is a negative value. He is seen as a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence . . .” (2000:

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424–25). Diaspora communities in conflict have historically believed that their cause must vanquish that of the opposing group, not only abroad but in the U.S. as well, since the American public can be sympathetic only to one cause, not both.25 Therefore, a rising Arab identity must mean a falling Jewish identity and vice versa. This assumption was the constant backdrop of the KGIA dispute, as members of each community attempted to assert their ownership and sense of belonging in New York City’s complex landscape.

“Who Can We Work With?”: A Jewish Perspective
The Jewish community has internally debated its relationship with the American Muslim and Arab communities, particularly since 9/11, but ultimately these debates trace back to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. The organized Jewish community, which supports and represents larger populations of American as well as world Jewry, independently determines what threats and benefits might result from various dialogues or joint projects. A 2004 article in The Jewish Week, a mainstream and widely distributed newspaper, addressed the complexities of this prevailing conversation. Editor Gary Rosenblatt, in his article “How to Deal with American Muslims,” made the following observation: “Whether, and how, U.S. Jews should deal with Muslim groups in this country is a vital issue that needs to be explored and discussed, particularly in the wake of 9-11. And the variety of possible responses—ignore them, confront them, dialogue with them—tells us as much about our own politics, beliefs and level of confidence as it does about the perceived potential threat of a growing Muslim presence in American life.”26 Rosenblatt weighs the options of interacting with American Muslims, or refusing to engage with them. On the one hand, American Jews should be sympathetic to a “fellow minority group being blamed for the actions of a small group of terrorists from other countries.” Jews, too, are well acquainted with scapegoating and the dangers of collective guilt. On the other hand, Muslims “are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, blame Israel for the conflict in the Mideast, and have targeted Zionism (and in some cases Jews) as the core of world problems.” These factors lead to the inevitable question, “Who can we work with?” This issue has been addressed by Harvard scholar Raquel Ukeles, who attempts to resolve the dilemma by confronting the danger of non-communication between coexisting communities. Ukeles argues that the Jewish community “needs to reconsider the criteria it uses to identify credible partners, including redefining ‘moderate,’ or there will be no one left to talk to.” Rosenblatt adds, “We fool ourselves if we think we can work with (at

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Continuities and Transformations

least on domestic issues) and educate only American Muslims who meet our standards of Mideast correctness.” In my own experience, those standards are highly problematic and dangerously exclusive. Most mainstream Jewish organizations, like the AntiDefamation League and national Jewish federations, do not include in their mission statements specific guidelines that determine who they “are not willing to work with.” Rather, they implement a seemingly impossible set of guidelines, which shifts on a case-by-case basis. It is crucial for the Jewish community to distinguish between domestic goals and foreign policy initiatives; yet American Jewish organizations must stand behind Israel in order to maintain mainstream support, which translates into major communal funding. These standards frequently compel the Jewish community to alienate any group that supports the Palestinian cause, which is typically viewed as a threat to Israel’s security. There are no mainstream Arab American or American Muslim organizations that categorically condemn Hamas or reject calls for Palestinian statehood in terms meant to satisfy the security interests of Israel. Political positions of this kind, if adopted independently or to appease the American Jewish public, would result in a loss of credibility in the Arab American and/or American Muslim communities. This difficult situation, faced by major organizations in many American diasporic populations, directly influences relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities. Prominent, mainstream organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are targeted by influential Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), then systematically excluded from dialogue and collaboration with the organized Jewish community and, whenever possible, with the community’s interlocutors in the larger society. Links to CAIR, which once honored Debbie Almontaser, were a key component in the case against her and KGIA. Isolating organizations like CAIR, however, thwarts the type of interfaith dialogue recommended by Ukeles. During a 2007 summer meeting I attended with leaders of the Jewish community, a representative from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York criticized other participants for their attempts to foster dialogue with Arab and Muslim New Yorkers: “You are meeting with nobodies.” They were meeting with “nobodies” because their undefined, yet restrictive, organizational guidelines effectively prevented them from working with “somebodies.” There is too much danger in talking to the latter group, since the “somebodies,” it is widely believed, may well be connected with terrorism. The risk of working with “nobodies,” however, is severe in itself, as the Jewish community attempts to share space with others and be

the director of the Arab American Association. Although Almontaser had not agreed to a formal relationship between KGIA and ADL. Antoine Faisal from Aramica. . While ADL does have many constructive policies. a clash between the two populations is echoed in the lack of formal partnerships between mainstream organizations from the “opposing” communities. they do support Israel and are therefore perceived by such critics as a Zionist organization that deserves to be isolated. because it endorses gay marriages? If our moral compass is so truly flawless. Assaf challenged critiques of ADL that fixated on their Zionist framework. . is producing a standstill in dialogue. labeled the Anti-Defamation League “the most racist organization in the country”27 for its pro-Israel policy. Arab American voices in the discussion that offered alternative points of view. There were. . Throughout her career.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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prominent yet approachable.
should we not also refuse the financial aid the school will receive from the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation? [on the false assumption that Bill Gates is a Jewish supporter of Israel] . thus begging the question: “Who can we work with?” Linda Sarsour. set a distinct standard for who they were not willing to work with: Zionists. should we even open a school in America. however. This paradox. . ?29
. Aref Assaf. courageously responded that drawing boundaries around Zionism was dangerously limiting. attacked Almontaser for ADL’s public support of KGIA. the main supporter of Israel . Is there anyone who wouldn’t be disturbed by this?28
Faisal. should we as Muslims not work with the ACLU . ADL’s defense solicited this response from Faisal:
Imagine a NYC charter school for African Americans called the Rosa Parks Academy with an emphasis on Black History and culture whose principal was found to have had a long standing relationship with the KKK.
“Who Can We Work With?”: An Arab Perspective
This debate has parallels in the Arab American community. the widely circulated local Arab American newspaper. it appears. where it is widely assumed that Jewish organizations that support Israel are inherently opposing the Palestinian struggle for statehood and supporting apartheid. from American Arab Forum. to have partners both within and outside of the Arab American community. . .” he argued. Although various collaborations do exist. and the community leaders interviewed in his article. Debbie Almontaser has struggled to appeal to both sides. “If we object to the support of ADL. particularly in social services.

Paley. which is funded by many conservative donors and certainly holds support for Israel high in its organizational mission. Although the Coalition in Support of KGIA gained support from the Arab American community and drew representatives from CAIR. The two ends of the “why we should or should not work with American Muslims” spectrum can be explored by looking closely at a distinct struggle: that between Daniel Pipes and Rabbi Michael Paley. like American Jews. and others. defining the landscape of “who’s who” and where they stood. studied Islam during his graduate studies and has since gained years of experience in communal and interfaith relations. —Exodus 23:9
As I followed the KGIA controversy. He and Pipes are frequently posed as spokesmen for opposing sides. Yet Assaf realizes that refusing to collaborate with any Jewish organizations in response to pro-Israel policies is dangerous and would “render our issues beyond mainstream America. They were the most vocal opponents of Debbie Almontaser and her most committed supporters.64
Continuities and Transformations
Assaf attempts to redraw the boundaries of “who we can work with” by noting the success of Jewish organizations in making their issues more mainstream by partnering with a greater variety of groups. often insisting that it was more a dispute between Jews than between Jews and Arabs or Muslims. I was surprised to find that Jews were prominent on all sides of the argument. fail to generate mainstream appeal. must determine the risk level of compromising their loyalties abroad when forming partnerships that will greatly advance their diaspora stature in the United States. One of these oppositions occurred after a Florida synagogue invited a representative from CAIR to give a high-
. having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. as a result. Support for Almontaser preceding her resignation was taken up by liberal Jews. KGIA functioned as a litmus test within the Jewish community.
Jewish Extreme versus Jewish Mainstream
You shall not oppress the stranger for you know the feelings of the stranger. the Arab American AntiDiscrimination Committee. who are often considered extreme and on the fringe and. renowned scholar Rashid Khalidi.”30 Arab Americans. As scholar in residence at UJA–Federation of New York. Jews claimed this struggle as their own. Rabbi Paley must be cautious and often draws criticism for his progressive views. who is my father. it was Jews who were highly visible and active on both sides. particularly in the aftermath of Almontaser’s resignation.

—Jewish dictum
Reactions to the Khalil Gibran International Academy generated a crisis of representation within the Jewish community. .” since this means that “none will pass. Paley believes that refusing dialogue with or support for Arab and Muslim Americans will undermine the America that has treated Jews so favorably.” This assault.” Paley. will present true danger to American Jews. . feels that a school like KGIA “requires scrutiny beyond that of any other group’s school. One people.” Pipes believes that securing American borders overrides the need to protect American (and Jewish) values that. was a misrepresentation of the Jewish community. he added. be the ideal location for Jews and Arabs to coexist and solve their conflict. arguing that “some critics will never accept CAIR unless we put Israel first and we’re not willing to do that. since mistreatment of the foreigner contradicts the scriptural position stated clearly in Exodus. as outlined in the Jewish Week article “Jewish Shootout over Arab School. in response to the demand that CAIR support Israel.” This argument pervaded the KGIA case. .The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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holiday sermon. . As has always been true of diaspora Jewries. .31 Pipes warned that “increased affluence and enfranchisement of American Muslims . Donna Nevel. Paley spoke against the demands made of Arab and Muslim Americans that “they pass an acid test—that Muslims are terrorists until proven innocent. according to a St. he believes. as if they are one person. the acts of one can represent the whole. Pipes. CAIR is a Muslim organization. . she believes.” He avidly supported the Bush administration’s policy of profiling. America could. The acts of one small cohort of Jews should not. . in her view. Petersburg Times article. In the aftermath.
Not in Our Name: Community Misrepresentation in the Public Arena
‫כל ׳שראל צרכ׳ם זה לזה‬ All Jews are responsible to each other. maintaining that “if you’re looking for terrorism you must give special scrutiny to this community. argued that “it should not be the job of CAIR to support Israel . on the other hand.” It will prove dangerous for the Jewish community not to accept other immigrant groups. joined this coalition because she felt the attacks on Almontaser were perpetrated “in the name of the Jewish community. in Paley’s view.” The Muslim speaker agreed. encourage the acceptance of the stranger.”32 Advocating a tolerant stance. a founder of Communities in Support of KGIA. Nevel believed it was her responsibility “to
. be mistaken for the voice of an entire community.

” The remainder of her comment. a reader of the New York Sun36
The process of creating a mainstream identity. that ‘inside’ is then mobilized to represent the nation itself in its public mode” (2001: 12). Arab American researcher Moustafa Bayoumi argued in support of KGIA that “a school institutionalizes the Arabic language and culture within the mainstream framework . sometimes viewed as a commodity. I don’t think I would have found it appropriate for me to defend. —Comment posted by Marie. You may think that you’re speaking on behalf of our community but this is not what the Jewish community wants. there is a need to expose allegedly private identities in the public sphere in order to form a realistic and accurate representation of the community in question (Shryock 2004: 301–303). Melani McAlister addresses the role of the private cultural world (marriage. and family).”34 He struggles to interject Jewish organizational defense only when necessary. Almontaser was stigmatized for her response to young students who asked her about Muslim involvement in 9/11: “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims. It is also accomplished in public schools. Providing the public with a positive glimpse into the life of a marginalized community ideally allows it to be seen not as a cultural impurity but rather as an accepted part of American society. In other words. and monuments. festivals. Paley agreed with Nevel. focused on a personal reputation that was damaged by others and must now be reclaimed: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion. saying: “If it hadn’t been for the Jews attacking.
. provides a minoritized community with a point of access to American society and a visible presence in the national mosaic. which the New York Post chose not to publish.66
Continuities and Transformations
stand up and say. This process occurs in the public sphere and is accomplished through such familiar mechanisms as museums. . Debbie Almontaser adopted a similar “Not in Our Name” stance following 9/11.”35
Entering the Public Arena
If you live here then become an American first and maintain your personal culture privately. They don’t reflect our community. home. ‘this is not our community. when she contended that her community was misrepresented by the actions of a few individuals. parades.’”33 Jewish organizations have struggled for years to create a mainstream identity and to claim a positive image for themselves in American society. which she believes is “necessary to constructing the ‘inside’ of the national community. .

and the Arabic Regents exam was only developed in the last few years. or “endanger. many of whom never had access to quality books like these.
The Dangers of Misunderstanding: Public Education as a Solution
Given the complex range of issues that shaped the KGIA debate. according to Louis Cristillo.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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institutionalizes it within a society. is intended to represent mainstream American identity and culture to the Arabic-speaking Middle East. because in the summer of 2007 a curriculum had not yet been adopted. and Morocco were given access to My Arabic Library. Curricula pertaining to Arabs and Muslims remain underfunded and underdeveloped. Given this lack of materials. students in Bahrain. it is important to point out that the central objection to the Khalil Gibran International Academy was its status as a public rather than private or charter
. Jordan. Debbie Almontaser selected the Scholastic My Arabic Library for use at KGIA.”37 The Khalil Gibran International Academy. Scholastic collaborated with the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative to translate American children’s books and ship them to the Middle East. Stop the Madrassa was especially concerned that the curriculum taught at KGIA would be pro-Arab. There are massive gaps in information about the Middle East and the Arab world in public school curricula.”38 Few New York City public schools have Arabic curricula. This teaching resource. This lack of knowledge about Arabs and Arabic has long been institutionalized in the American public education system. both at KGIA and across the nation. not to enrich. They were unable to gain access to KGIA curricula.” students like those attending KGIA by offering them sympathetic information about the Arab world. the stated goal is actually to benefit the Middle East by introducing it to American children’s literature. and anti-Israel. pro-Muslim. according to Scholastic. In 2007. only two high schools offer Arabic courses. is to ensure that “millions of children. and its supporters demanded to inspect the school’s teaching materials. is “perfect in the sense that it’s really at the forefront of curriculum development of areas that are sorely needed in the New York public school system. who would impart this knowledge to the general public. Lebanon. however. will now get to experience stories that capture their imaginations and teach them about the world. contrary to Pipes’s assumptions.”39 Ironically. rather than the reverse. The aim of this initiative. KGIA was originally conceived as an attempt to fill these gaps with accurate information and to impart critical knowledge of a misunderstood culture and understudied language to a new generation of American public school students.

the responsibility of public education. It is also true that the overwhelming majority of Arabs are Muslims and that Islam. This argument is easily critiqued: the sheer fact that perhaps 75 percent of Arab Americans are not Muslim and that less than 20 percent of the Muslim world speaks Arabic would be information enough to correct Feldman’s misunderstanding. Learning about Islam is appropriate to American curricula because religion is a major component of American society. and her manner of dress reinforced the common assumption that KGIA would be an Islamic school. Almontaser considers herself perfectly capable of distinguishing between her private identity and her public responsibilities. Similarly. American version of the British and Canadian models of state-run religious schools catering to Muslims. Surfing the current wave of Islamophobia. is not a topic any school dedicated to understanding Arab language and culture could realistically ignore. The popular argument posed by New York Times contributor and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman was that “Islam will presumably be taught” and that KGIA “is a watered-down. it is hard for most Americans to distinguish between Arab and Muslim identities. the school she envisions would teach about religion. Almontaser has certainly been targeted for criticism because she wears it. KGIA has private religious value rather than public secular value. just as all public schools teach about the major world religions. Elements of this scenario are reminiscent of L’affaire du foulard.”40 Feldman suggested that. in which French Muslims were banned from wearing the hijab in public schools. Her decision to publicize her Muslim identity provoked opposition from those who believed that such a religious symbol was threatening to the American school system.68
Continuities and Transformations
school. it gave critics the opportunity to attack her Muslim identity. teaching religion is. in fact. as an aspect of Arab civilization and history. Almontaser’s hijab represented her desire to impose her private identity on the public sphere. the individual’s right to wear the scarf was judged a threat to the integrity of a public sphere free of religious symbolism (Benhabib 2004: 183).
. as a religion. Islam. was not the intention of KGIA. even though the teaching of Islam. While she has never been prevented from wearing the hijab by her employers. Her hijab was emphasized and stigmatized. as a religious Muslim. Debbie Almontaser.41 Still. has worn the hijab for her entire career with the Department of Education. to critics of KGIA. As she has constantly asserted. While promoting culture or language in the public domain through city-funded schools is not generally prohibited. and an anti-Western mentality. In France. critics of KGIA suggested the synonymous nature of Arabic. Controversy arose around whether highlighting Arab identity and the Arabic language is. due to its religious nature.

defined by links to multiple places (“here” and “there”). Arab Americans. a predicament that leads to a critical question: Can immigrants relocate their political imaginations within American borders. The September 11 attacks were carried out by men who were Arab and professed to be Muslim. Since that moment. Popular American misconceptions about what defines Arabs and Muslims have proven dangerous. uncertainty about Arabs and Muslims has grown. This is due to the (sometimes) awkward fact that American citizens can identify with. The U. and Muslims produced deadly outcomes. The complex struggles between figures like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were played down. which can lead to ambivalent attachments to American society (Appadurai 1996: 172). When exacting revenge for the 9/11 attacks. at a cost of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of human lives. cultural and geopolitical borders were entirely unclear. or remained unrecognized. In the act of plotting an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks. the American government imposed an imagined sense of responsibility on two countries. and they have become particularly confused in light of recent events. Wars waged abroad are particularly complicated for America. other nations and states. government has yet to create a consistent policy for the treatment of immigrant communities and individuals whose home countries are under attack. a nation composed of numerous immigrant populations and domestic diasporas. Transnational identities. have always been blurry. by interactions with new immigrants. and by solidarities cultivated by community institutions (Cainkar 2002: 6). or does a substantial part of their loyalty and patriotism remain abroad? Concerns about the dual loyalties of diasporic communities.S. particularly in this moment of conflict. as well as abroad. and they
. The American government has given minimal effort to comprehending the complexities and contradictions that mark these identities. a country. and the American government determined that the acts of a handful of individuals could in fact be treated as the acts of a nation. Pervasive ignorance about Arabs. are not illegitimate. which it promptly invaded and still occupies.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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A Borderless War against Indistinguishable Identities
Representations of the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. a community. a religion. Afghanistan and Iraq. and even belong to. As American mono-patriotism becomes an increasingly unrealistic expectation. These patterns of identity reinforcement are found among both secular and religious communities. many diasporic communities do indeed have dual loyalties. are nourished and reinforced by return trips to immigrant homelands.

called Osama. What oppo-
. allowing overtly Muslim behavior and Arab identities into the American mainstream was. “when the United States goes to war in their homelands. Determining loyalties is a critical step in defining Otherness and isolating political impurities that threaten American society. and speaks the language of the enemy. had serious consequences on the domestic front. for many critics of the KGIA. That “they” might now have their own public school would mean that being Arab and Muslim was simply another way of being American. Muslims and Arabs.” writes Nadine Naber. American civilians worked out a similar tendency to categorize their enemies sloppily at home. it was believed.70
Continuities and Transformations
are nowhere more evident than in American Jewish loyalties to Israel. “You’re either with us or with them. Those perceived to be Arab were held accountable. and not to Arabs and Muslims as a whole.” While them referred to the terrorists. who “felt that their hijab was legitimately part of the American cultural landscape” (Hatem 2005: 44). and Afghans and Iraqis were lumped in a uniform class of Muslim enemies. possessed the most dangerous dual loyalty of all: allegiance to Islam and the Arab world. even when the loyalties in question are Arab and Muslim. unimaginable. They were labeled terrorists. Hyphenated Muslim and Arab American identities were stigmatized and viewed as inconsistent and potentially dangerous. Such feelings are intelligible to most Americans. prays the prayers. The stigmatization of the hijab was shocking for American Muslims. the labels were treated as synonymous and interchangeable. and one might easily conclude that the anxiety triggered by the prospect of an Arab public school in New York City was fueled by the ideological discomfort caused by the realization that “dual loyalties” are now a common feature of American society and might be legitimately available to all citizens. This level of acceptance represented what many Americans feared: that Middle Eastern Muslims are no longer only in the Middle East (McAlister 2001: 261). Misperceptions about Arabs and Muslims.
Insisting on Stigma
While a collapse of identities occurred overseas. and asked to apologize for attacks they did not carry out or support. the significance of this process is that it legitimizes the distinction between ‘Americans’ and a constructed enemy Other/enemy of the nation” (2006: 236). At the same time. Debbie Almontaser was subject to accusations of impurity and disloyalty: she wears the clothing. “Immigrant communities are targeted. especially an inability to distinguish between the two. As President Bush repeatedly stated.

According to Rabbi Paley. Many leaders in these communities believe their communal identities will be compromised if a place is carved out for an “opposing” identity. Although situated within the framework of a war against terrorism. “The foreign war is not just a foreign war against real Muslims. Here. became a critical site for confronting. the current conflict has resulted in a war of identity centered on a culture under siege. particularly in the public domain. which should not have been a school about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The global nature of American society enables us to reconsider conflicts abroad on the common ground of a hyphenated American identity. a war against Arabs and Muslims. The Khalil Gibran International Academy served as a battleground. parochial understanding of what it means to be American. For many New Yorkers. us. however. at ground level. for understanding conflicting definitions of American identity. America today is a compelling reality for American Jewry in the larger context of Jewish history. that the battle is not one of us vs. America holds unique opportunities. if not necessarily reconsidering. them but rather one of us vs. This internal clash represents a long-standing but nevertheless urgent American battle: the struggle to define ourselves. one of the most important overseas conflicts in shared American space. This country can serve as a microcosm in which all overseas entanglements can be confronted. America provides a haven for diasporic communities. Fears of KGIA focused on the possibility that it would erode the us vs. and a laboratory. The Khalil Gibran International Academy. For Jews. It has become clear. populations struggling in diaspora can learn what it means to be a reinterpretation of a community rooted geographically in another time or place. This communal struggle is charged by distrust of “the Other” and persistent attempts to maintain an outdated.”42 The domestic struggle of various diasporic communities is one of definition: “Who are we?” This question has shaped the struggle between American Jewish and Arab and Muslim American communities. The future
. KGIA had the potential to serve as a terrorist training cell. but [also a war waged] for the sake of our identity. them binary that has been essential to American rhetoric in a “war on terror” that is.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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nents of the KGIA seemed to fear most was not the Arab Muslim as alien and Other. and if this country upholds its potential and embraces its reality. but the likelihood that the Arab Muslim might be incorporated into the American Self. a nation constantly in diaspora. an American madrassa that would infiltrate our society and propagate dangerous Arab mentalities. who pose no threat to us. it can become the first truly global nation.

well aware that the school was ill equipped to address their behavioral and educational needs.org/.htm.” New York Post.htm.
. 6. http://www. Ibid. 2007.com/foreign/madrassa-grows-in-brooklyn/53060/. half of KGIA’s staff had been removed and the plan to extend KGIA to a high school had been crushed. 5.com/.”43 One of the school’s Arabic teachers informed me that one of the students had called her a “terrorist.com/2007/08/29/education/29education. It’s out of control. New Visions grant proposal. Daniel Pipes. copy in author’s possession. 4.meforum.” New York Sun.72
Continuities and Transformations
of the school is unresolved. however. yell and scream. 3.
Epilogue
According to the NYC Department of Education. Chuck Bennett and Jana Winter.com/seven/08072007/news/columnists/ shirting_the_issue_columnists_andrea_peyser. 2007. http://www. It is a disturbing. “City Principal Is ‘Revolting’: Tied to ‘Intifada NYC’ Shirts. curse and swear. April 24.wordpress. Since her resignation.” By the conclusion of the school year. August 29. In reality. KGIA’s former science teacher.org. Middle East Forum home page: http://www. August 7. as Americans. the Department of Education transferred a number of special-needs students into the incoming sixth-grade class. and in the American public sphere. “Shirting the Issue: ‘Sorry’ Principal First Defends ‘Intifada’-Wear. potentially enlightening contest over who we. Sean Grogan. http:// www. “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn. debilitating problems. http://www.com/seven/08062007/ news/regionalnews/city_principal_is_revolting_regionalnews_chuck_bennett_and _jana_winter. Samuel Freedman. the Khalil Gibran International Academy.” New York Post.nytimes. Stop the Madrassa home page: http://stopthemadrassa. the first year of the Khalil Gibran International Academy was a success. August 6. can be. the school was ridden with serious.nypost. In the fall of 2007. reported to The New York Times that “kids bang on the partitions. 7. Pipeline home page: http: //pipelinenews. continues.nypost.org/uploads/paley 101607.awaam. 8. and the struggle for Arab and Muslim space in New York. Arab Women in the Arts and Media website: http://www.” New York Times.nysun. Andrea Peyser.mov. 2007. 9. Debbie Almontaser has lost both a court case and an appeal to have her position reinstated. 2007. 2.44
Notes
1.html. “Critics Ignored Record of a Muslim Principal.

nysun.’” online posting. “Arabic Language School Struggles to Find a Home. 23. 2002.com/2002/08/19/nyregion/for-muslims-uneasy-anniversary-urge-speak-conflicts-with -low-profile-instincts. to the 1967 Six-Day War. have been displaced during wars with Israel. November 12. “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn.html. In this context. Daniel Pipes. Jordanians.com/2007/10/10/theres-something-fishy-about -the-kgia-advisory-board. 20. 18.” New York Times. currently overpower the practically invisible pro-Palestinian lobby. “For Muslims. began in September 2000. 12. 24. Ibid. August 15 2007. the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.nysun.com/2007/08/11/nyregion/11school.” New York Times. the Khalil Gibran International Academy. October 10. Powerful pro-Israel lobbies. also known as the al-Aqsa Intifada.wordpress. August 15.” New York Sun. To clarify: “Intifada” literally means the act of shaking off. 2007. From its 1948 independence. 22. 14.ny1.The Khalil Gibran International Academy
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10. like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. http:// www. The First Intifada lasted from 1987 to 1993 and originated in Palestinian civil disobedience. the 1973 war. 2007.com/default.thenation. http://stopthemadrassa. August 11. The Second Intifada. Wakin. Daniel J. arguably in response to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount.html. Daniel Pipes. “New Approach Needed for Arab School. Larry Cohler-Esses. and the Gulf wars. 11. Israel has deeply affected the region. “Critics Ignored Record of a Muslim Principal.nysun. http://www. it refers to two Palestinian uprisings against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. August 19. an Uneasy Anniversary. January 24. New Visions grant proposal. http://www. Daniel Pipes.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1. It is yet to officially end although most believe it to be over.com/2007/08/29/education/29education. “The New McCarthyism. http://www. American Jews have consistently viewed their efforts with suspicion. The rise of Zionism and the growing alliance between the United States and Israel has long shaped the Arab American landscape. 2007.” New York Sun. 16. and boycotts. personal interview.nytimes .
.” May 4.aspx?ArID=69409&SecID=1000. This Intifada was significantly more violent than the first.com/foreign/madrassa-grows-in-brooklyn/53060/. Julie Bosman. Urge to Speak Out Conflicts with Low-Profile Instincts. “Head of City’s Arabic School Steps Down under Pressure. 19. “New Approach Needed for Arab School. 2007.com/new-york/new-approach-needed-for-arab-school/60542/. http://www. http://www. Helen Hatab Samhan. general strikes. Palestinians. “Who Are Arab Americans?” Arab American Institute Foundation. 2007. Louis Cristillo. Many Arab populations. 2008. highly publicized act of stone throwing. 21.” The Nation. http:// www. 2007. April 24. As Arab Americans respond to this reality.com/doc/20071112/cohler-esses. Samuel Freedman. 2007. including Lebanese. NY1 News. 15.nytimes.org/foundation/358/arab-americans. 13.aaiusa. http://www.” New York Sun.com/new-york/new-approach-needed-for-arab-school/60542/.nytimes. 17. with greater publicity and a higher number of casualties. August 29. although it is widely remembered for the violent. and Egyptians. “There’s Something Fishy about KGIA ‘Advisory Board.” New York Times. http://www.

Yet the Orientalist remained outside the Orient. the highly influential study challenging the authority of Western representations of the “Orient” through the twin prisms of knowledge and power. (1978: 222)
It is this distance—in part physical. Said identified Orientalism as a type of discourse which possesses “a will or intention to understand” what was non-European. 79
. Edward Said published Orientalism. and having authority” (Said 1978: 3) over both an object of study and a region of the world.” As we shall see. barely intelligible civilization or cultural monument. sympathetically portraying. and in so doing. however much it was made to appear intelligible. moreover. remained beyond the Occident. according to Said. distance becomes more difficult to maintain in a globalizing age. which. but more fundamentally ontological—that preserved the essential framework of an “us” and a “them. inwardly grasping the hard-to-reach object. This distance endowed the Orientalist with his or her “flexible positional superiority” (1978: 7). The study of the Orient. was a sort of translator—often literally so—of the Orient to the Occident but was always translating one culture for another from the detached perspective of a learned Westerner. and “in some cases to control and manipulate what was manifestly different” (1978: 12). developed a style for “dominating. operated not as an innocent intellectual pursuit but functioned as a handmaiden to empire.3
The God That Failed: The Neo-Orientalism of Today’s Muslim Commentators
Moustafa Bayoumi
Thirty years ago. restructuring. The Orientalist. the Orientalist scholar reduced the obscurity by translating. The Orientalist always spoke for the Orient. so that
the relation between the Orientalist and Orient was essentially hermeneutical: standing before a distant.

But there is a (somewhat) new twist on an old doctrine.g. in other senses it does not. a recurring theme in Orientalist work is that “Islam” is the regulator of life from “top to bottom” (Said 1981: xvi). Thus. enormously variegated analyses of social structures. histories.” writes British Orientalist Duncan Macdonald. Instead. because the “supernatural is so near that it may touch him at any moment” (quoted in Said 1978: 277). it was cited recently in the New York Times as a reference book in the library of a counterinsurgency colonel in Iraq (Gordon 2007). ex-Muslim (Hirsi Ali). and Reza Aslan. contemporary multiculturalism melds with old-style Orientalism in the writings of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. like imperialism.) The fact that these explainers are themselves Western Muslims in some sense collapses the Orientalist distance between East and West. it has reemerged with a vengeance. New York Times correspondents—e. The old trope of “Islamic imperialism” is resuscitated in Efraim Karsh’s (2006) book by the same name. “It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental. for there would be no need for explainers if there were no wide differences between peoples. promising an insider message of telling it to you like it is! (Hint: Everything Muslims do is motivated by Islam. reissued. a motif Said characterizes as not just intellectually lazy but as a model of intellectual production that would be inapplicable to the serious study of Western culture. cultural foundations. is dusted off. There the humanities and social sciences engage in “complex theories. in the Orientalist canon. From Islam comes everything and to Islam goes everything. “Islam” accounts for the sum total of any Muslim’s experience. never seems to go out of style. Robert Worth (2005)—prepare themselves for war reporting in Iraq by reading the old Orientalist Bernard Lewis. It is almost facile to point out that Orientalism. and it is worth paying it some attention. and sent into wide circulation in the United States military. but none of that is found in the Orientalist world of “Islam. and sophisticated languages of investigation” (Said 1981: xvi). where she later rose to promi-
. Irshad Manji.80
Modern (Self) Criticism
Said also shows us how. Today. who himself has had virtually unparalleled access to the corridors of power in the Bush era. it is not politics that produces (varieties of) Islam in history. eventually winning asylum in the Netherlands. in the age of terror. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in war-torn Somalia. or barely Muslim (Manji).” In short. which she fled as a child. In fact. trash scholarship from a generation ago.. three commentators who self-describe either as Muslim (Aslan). The Arab Mind (Patai 2002 [1973]). Each also claims to reveal the true nature of Islam to Western audiences. “Islam” produces politics. and Orientalism’s aim is to drive this point home with a repeated and relentless monotony.

where she was raised.S. Hirsi Ali. Reza Aslan was born in Iran in 1972.000 total copies of The Trouble with Islam. repackaged as The Trouble with Islam Today for the paperback version. government through a press release (hardly a common practice. I offer that this is simply a ridiculous message. and Aslan have become some of today’s most prominent explainers of “Islam. The force of their message in other words is a mission: “Islam” can (or will naturally) be converted from its current treachery into a benign and more palatable force for the Western world. Scholars may have little use for the autobiographical musings of Hirsi Ali or the puerile polemics of Manji. Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands and relocated to the United States. one a collection of essays called The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (2006). including the screenplay for Submission. and the other an autobiography titled Infidel (2007). Evolution. a short film about the treatment of women in Islam by Theo van Gogh (for which she provided the voiceover narration and for which van Gogh would later be assassinated by Mohammed Bouyeri). 2007). and Aslan’s No god but God comes in at over 70. He and his family left Iran after the revolution in 1979. Manji has sold more than 60. Moreover.000 copies in hardcover. Hirsi Ali’s Infidel has sold more than 120. which was announced by the U. Nevertheless. She has published two books.com/tab/ industries/media/entertainment. She and her family fled the East African dictatorship when Manji was four years old.000 sales. Irshad Manji was born in Uganda under Idi Amin’s tyrannical rule. each author is accorded significant media exposure and is credentialed by various institutions and think tanks of higher learning and the power elite. She is the author of several works. She quickly received permanent residency. to say the least). settling in Vancouver. and each of their books either implicitly or explicitly raises the specter of misguided or dangerous Muslims living in our midst. and she began working at the American Enterprise Institute.” According to a search on BookScan (http://en-us. Aslan is the author of No god but God: The Origins.nielsen. Canada. and that to focus on “Islam” is to entertain a distraction that takes us away from attending to the many serious political issues of our time. from Yale University (where Manji was a
. performed on October 5. a conservative think tank.The God That Failed
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nence as a legislator known for her anti-immigrant views. Manji is the author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith (2003). the fact remains that Manji. and Future of Islam (2005). when Aslan was about seven years old. The very existence of these explainers indicates the substantial presence of Muslims in the West. After questions arose regarding the truthfulness of her statements regarding her own immigration petition. settling in the United States.

when it happened. Hirsi Ali.82
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fellow) to the conservative American Enterprise Institute (where Hirsi Ali is a fellow) to CBS News (where Aslan is a consultant). Bakhsh in 1926. For one thing. These brief stories narrate the struggle to proclaim one’s belief in Christ in the face of Muslim obscurantism in the Muslim world. and they come with all the good news that the gospel is spreading in Muslim territory. Ijtihad has a long history within Islam and
. But in the cases of Hirsi Ali and Manji.” written by one J. Their offerings about “Islam.” however. as one or two converts along the missionary way may bode well for the power of the gospel. who compose narratives centered on their own religious experiences.” Ijtihad. Moreover. but do not reveal a fully formed social movement. Manji and Aslan take on the old cliché of “the closing of the gates of ijtihad. of course. immediately comes to mind. refers to the Islamic juridical principle of independent reasoning within religious law. written by “an Indian Convert” in Lahore. There should be no question that their influence is significant. Fouad Ajami. A. raise doubts. the early narratives are essentially about the righteousness of Christianity in the world. a senior editor at the London Review of Books. and Aslan all point to a clearly articulated set of problems that can be summarized as follows: “Islam” is or has become a totalizing system that lags behind the wheel of progress. and if there is any opportunity to emancipate Islam from itself. The idea of Orientals talking to Western audiences in a Western medium has its predecessors. Manji. and blindly oppresses its followers. but the similarity basically ends there. Comparing these essays with Hirsi Ali’s and Manji’s texts holds insofar as both sets of narratives describe the fundamentally closed world of Islam. Where they differ is in their views of how this happened. the distance between the Muslim and Christian worlds is still fundamentally alive in the old narratives. the Lebanese American historian. Today’s Muslim commentators speak from their authority as Muslims to talk not about the glories of Christianity but about the failings of Islam. chronicler of Arab failures. for precursors. According to Adam Shatz. for these are the kind of explanations that demand explanation. one could page back to the conversion narratives found in early editions of The Muslim World. and close confidant of several members of the Bush administration. or “The Story of My Conversion. There we find such narratives by Muslims as “How Christ Won My Heart” (1916). a journal that began publishing in 1911. And the failures are many. defies individuality. “Ajami’s unique role in American political life has been to unpack the unfathomable mysteries of the Arab and Muslim world and to help sell America’s wars in the region” (2003: 15). We can read “A Mohammedan Imam’s Discovery of Christ” (Barton 1916).

and Hirsi Ali—point to the problems of hadith transmission (the system by which the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are passed down through the ages) to argue that Islam has been forever beset by human fallibility. in Manji’s and Aslan’s hands. . Wael B. in his word. Manji’s and Aslan’s texts go to considerable lengths to pinpoint a period of Islamic glory (for Aslan.” We can make a point. by noting the reliance of these contemporary travelers in Islam on such explanations. Hallaq here argues that since the science of hadith. Furthermore. however. . outlawed [ijtihad] as a legitimate tool of exegesis . who at that time dominated nearly all the major schools of law. and this closed door.The God That Failed
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Islamic jurisprudence. the Western discovery of hadith forgery is largely. explains the current intellectual. from Albert Hourani to Said Ramadan. and many commentators (Manji and Aslan among them) have argued that the practice of ijtihad was essentially snuffed out in the ninth or tenth century c. In 1984. writes that “the Traditionalist Ulama. and the Ulama have been able to manipulate their believers into what modern science can now reveal as blind systems of oppression. (Many others who read inside the tradition. The problem with drawing attention to the inherent limitations of hadith transmission and the closure of the gates of ijtihad. all three commentators—Manji. . Manji. “Was the gate of ijtihad closed?” in an important article with that query as its title.” which led to a “freez[ing] of debate within Islam” so that “we in the twenty-first century live with the consequences of this thousand-year-old strategy to keep the [Islamic] empire from imploding” (2003: 59). could be discovered through human reason” (2005: 165). gates of ijtihad and therefore the tradition of independent thought. contains within it the means to adjudicate “strong” from “weak” ahadith. In brief. two common preoccupations among many Orientalist schools. is that they are both non-issues. it is the period
. “The Authenticity of Prophetic Hâdith: A Pseudo-Problem” (1999). notes that “Baghdad oversaw the closing of the . . . moral. . “pointless. for example. Aslan.” Aslan. reach the same conclusions. Hallaq asked the question.e. answering that “a systematic and chronological study of the original legal sources reveals that these views on the history of ijtihad after the second/eighth century are entirely baseless and inaccurate” (1984: 4).d.) Hallaq composed another retort to the perennial issue of hadith transmission in another essay. and political stultification of “Islam. too./a. This idea is commonly referred to as “the closing of the gates of ijtihad” in favor of irrational obedience to religious authority. a pursuit within Islamic jurisprudence. signal[ing] the beginning of the end for those who held that religious truth .

Moreover. and it is worth examining what kinds of threads underpin their Grand
. intellectual sleights of hand like “closing the gates of ijtihad” and fabricating ahadith. But that is not what is happening here. where the faith is both a singular system and a singular force in the world. in other words. After describing the rise and fall of capitalism and communist society. since Grand Narratives by design are propelled by such singular causes and effects that move their story forward in world historical time. And with Aslan.84
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of the Prophet. The problem arises not when a faith system is placed in history but when it is used to explain history. the Grand Narratives they posit all describe a straightforward binary of a pre-modern Islam that has erected barriers for Muslims. or even the very faith itself—account for the political behavior of Muslims throughout the world and in world historical time. human proximity to or distance from Islam explains history. Manji. principles and values cannot survive: the source of belief issuing from God which gives comprehensive interpretation to existence. Hence. I should make it clear that I am not opposed to scholastic treatments of faith systems. hindering them from entering modernity. they [the Euro-American] were basically temporary civilizations. many Salafi literalists—those who reject the major schools of Islamic law and instead argue for a direct reading of the Quran and sunnah (the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad)—operate similarly. All three are invested. Thus arises the Grand Narrative. and they rely on the production of a Grand Narrative to achieve their goals. and Hirsi Ali. In Islam: The Religion of the Future (1984). the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb offers a world historical narrative about the rise and fall of civilizations due to religion and human nature. Hirsi Ali. But if post-structuralism has taught us anything it should be skepticism of all Grand Narratives. in drawing a singular narrative account of Islam. ultimately finds nothing redeemable in Islam but argues that Muslims “don’t have to take six hundred years to go through a reformation” and need to “examine [their faith] critically. for Manji it is al-Andalus—Islamic Spain) in counterpoint to today’s distress. these barriers—a rigid Ulama. In fact. In Qutb’s account. to the status of man and his objectives on earth. or to examining them through history or even within a comparative framework. though out of opposite social circumstances. Each of these three texts relies on its own Grand Narrative to prove its point. for example. and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression” (2007: 350). on the other hand. Qutb writes that “all these [capitalist and communist] civilizations were cut off from the original source without which social orders. without roots attached to the depths of human nature” (1984: 63).

Frederick Douglass titles the account of his life My Bondage and My Freedom. the prisons. Natural disasters are a sign from God. it comes with going to school in the Netherlands. drought and flooding. “there were huge floods across Holland. was full of terms I didn’t understand. Part of the reason may lie in the structure of the work. Hirsi Ali divides her story into “My Childhood” and “My Freedom. to show humans they are misbehaving on earth. she tells us. they let me enroll in Driebergen Vocational College anyway. flight to Saudi Arabia. By the skin of my teeth. like municipality and upper chamber. I didn’t see anybody praying” (2007: 239). I scraped through it. not just in language but also in political thinking. I failed the Dutch class by one point: I still couldn’t write proper grammar. But because I had my Dutch equivalency exam. “it seemed as if . “In February 1995. I had made it” (2007: 229). Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas” (2007: 239).
. and she liberally uses skin color to argue her point. she begins work as a translator in the Dutch social welfare sector. But the Dutch blamed their government for failing to maintain the dikes properly. hers is also one about achieving true consciousness under a system of oppression. In the slave narrative. but they also enable simplistic comparisons. the discovery of consciousness is generically inscribed in the act of learning how to write. Education and the Dutch language may bring consciousness to Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali’s narrative makes this case repeatedly.” she writes. and this experience further hardens her to the Muslims in her midst. Consider how she describes the vocational college preparatory classes that she was finally able to take.” And like the slave narrative. When Somalis are faced with catastrophic weather. Later. and the performance of naïveté is instructive of the move from blindness to vision. With Hirsi Ali. we find a detail-driven memoir of a clearly turbulent life that involves survival in war-torn Somalia. . and Muslims are guilty of enslaving themselves. she studied history voraciously. which in fact replicates the American slave narrative in significant ways. Turning first to Hirsi Ali.The God That Failed
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Narratives to give them force to Western readers. they all get together and pray. “When I went to awful places—the police stations. oppression through female circumcision and forced marriage. But perhaps the first thing to notice from the point of view of narrative is why we are drawn to the story. . refugee hardship in Kenya. “The civics class. “That history book taught me Dutch. There.” she writes. It is in many ways a compelling read. she writes. on the other hand. everything I read challenged me as a Muslim. The obscurant and anti-intellectual world of Islam functions as the slave system in Hirsi Ali’s universe. When it comes to her education. and the remaking of a new life in the Netherlands.

becomes Hirsi Ali’s path to emancipation (2007: 280). we suppressed the freedom to think and to act as we chose. If they are to enter modernity. Later.86
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the abortion clinics and penal courts. then wasn’t it possible. . they must give up God within their creed. . I began to wonder why so many immigrants—so many Muslims—were there” (2007: 243). According to Hirsi Ali. It gives us large amounts of context. Manji’s is an epistolary text. As the Bible has the power to move the spirit in the slave narrative. making it in fact a text of lost promise. and self-aggrandizing sanctimony. “that one of the reasons could be Islam? Islam influences every aspect of believers’ lives” (2007: 279). She proceeds to catalogue the manner in which she was schooled in a “madrassa” in Richmond. comes not through Christianity but through atheism. The Atheist Manifesto. We were not just servants of Allah. It was not something you could avoid noticing. and by the end of her narrative it is clear that she is lecturing all the Muslims of the world. for what would it matter if one Muslim gives up her faith? Hers is instead a broad prescription for all her co-religionists. we Muslims had set up a static tyranny . “I have to be honest with you. patent inaccuracies. “Islam is on very thin ice with me” (2003: 1). . she answers her question. British Columbia. a polemic rife with willful distortions. But Hirsi Ali’s salvation from slavery. we were slaves” (2007: 272).” she begins. In her junior
. the unemployment offices and the shelters for battered women—I began to notice how many dark faces looked back at me. coming straight in from creamy-blond Leiden. Islam’s salvation is atheism. I will not bother to list these—there are far too many to treat this as a serious work worthy of such scrutiny—but we can explore its narrative structure in a fashion similar to the way we explored Hirsi Ali’s memoir. .” she asks.
Hirsi Ali’s text is actually rich in detail about different social movements and political strife. “If Muslim immigrants lagged so far behind even other immigrant groups. not just individually but theologically. But the emancipation she details is not hers alone. full of Thomas Friedman–like platitudes and born out of disillusionment. “by declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him. The same cannot be said of Irshad Manji’s The Trouble with Islam (2003). . updated for today. and how the experience traumatized her into action later in life. the former slave finds redemption in True Christianity. In the prototypical slave narrative. Meanwhile. loaned to her by her boyfriend.

The Palestinians. I know who my family is” (2003: 85). ethnic strife in Nigeria. she encounters difficulty entering the Al-Aqsa compound but freely visits the Wailing Wall. universal. She even draws parallels between the Prophet and bin Laden over the course of several pages. Judaism and Israel function as the antitheses to Islam. (And what about the Hindus of East Africa?) Muslims are responsible for the honor killings of Pakistan. For Manji. the lack of independent women travelers in Malaysia. as if every Muslim is individually responsible for the action of every other nominally Muslim person in the entire world and throughout time. and the Turkish nationalist genocide of Armenians of 1915. While the West is proudly freethinking. Such emotional blackmail is Manji’s style: she goes to great lengths to posit Islam as a faith locked outside the gates of modernity due to its tyrannical anti-intellectualism. suppress their brainpower [with] the stated aim of the no-thinking rule” (2003: 59). then weave through the crowd to approach the wall. I feel at home. and liberal to the core.The God That Failed
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high school. and the middle of her book is turned over to a narration of a six-day trip—paid for by a Canadian Jewish group—to Israel and the occupied territories.” she says (2003: 5). function as the ultimate expression of the failures of Islam. catching his opponents unawares. this is especially evident in her narrative on the state of Israel. She presents Judaism as broadminded. wearing a white polyester chador and departed several hours later with [her] hair flattened and her spirit deflated” (2003: 11). in Manji’s view. just as Muslims are the cause of every tragedy she can muster. She gets more specific. I don’t feel like an interloper [as the Palestinians have made her feel]. Still. . I realize I’m holding up the Jews behind me. and as models to aspire to. she writes. “Islam” is the cause of this oppression. “Muslims did this!” she keeps intoning. and crippling their combat-ready thoroughbreds. and Jews are the most freethinking of Westerners. “The Muslims of East Africa treated blacks like slaves.” she “entered . There. we are lectured again and again. “I borrow a pencil and scrawl a request to God. More viscerally than ever. “dignity of the individual prevailed. . As I spend time in search of an unused crack that will clasp my prayer. She uses cultural-religious terms—Islam and Judaism—
. arguing that the Prophet “won decisive military victories through such primitive tactics as digging a ditch around his settlement.” and then offering that “bin Laden’s cavalry used box-cutters to attack a superpower” (2003: 149). . for Manji. “mainstream Muslims . she tells us. .” but in her “madrassa. At the heart of Manji’s polemic is the way in which Muslim and/or Palestinian “culture” squelches the individual (2003: 158). Judaism stands as the ultimate expression of modernity and the culmination of the West. In Jerusalem.

. The initial message of Islam was freedom and liberty. with their lives” (2003: 3). (If this is “Islam’s story” then where is Indonesia or Mali or Albania?) The second is the central conceit of the book. where Islam is “irredeemably rigid” (2003: 33) and “brain-dead” (2003: 31). but one that nonetheless operates on a grand scale. Aslan’s book is full of the performance of partisan scholarship (he proudly accepts that he is writing an “apology” for Islam). Aslan’s book reads like a revisionist history of the Iranian revolution. Their communist masters refused to let them emigrate to Israel. and from two different directions. For Irshad Manji. “It simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah. since the early days of the revolutionary message of egalitarianism. I take this phrase. Here Aslan narrates the early days of Islam with control and sympathy. and. In this bizarre narrative. describing how Islam is well on the road to replicating Christianity.” she writes. “That doesn’t mean I refuse to be a Muslim. “How many of us know the degree to which Islam is a ‘gift of the Jews’?” (2003: 21). she imperiously lectures them about how they deserve their fate. sometimes. describing the religion’s emergence within the social context of the Arabian peninsula of that era.) The first half of the book travels over familiar territory. been hijacked by the clerics. however. She asks.88
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but it is really politics that drives her framework. insofar as it is a book about Islam as a faith. More fundamental problems soon arise. in fact. even becomes the true Islam. “Islam” can enter modernity. namely that Islam—like Christianity—is going through a reformation. For their attempts to leave the Soviet Union. we find a more complicated narrative. Instead. Manji refuses to grant the Palestinians even basic rights. And thus her self-label as a “Muslim Refusenik” takes on another dimension. many refuseniks paid with hard labor and. explaining why she calls herself a refusenik.” she continues.
Turning to Reza Aslan’s No god but God (2005). But this need not mean his book is beyond criticism. but that message has. and that some of his public interventions are helpful. Judaism. it is relatively unproblematic. “from the original refuseniks—Soviet Jews who championed religious and personal freedom. due solely to the faults of their Muslim culture. (And I should add that Aslan’s text is immeasurably more nuanced than Hirsi Ali’s and Manji’s. The first is the use of what Aslan calls the “story” of Islam to explain the subsequent history and politics of the Middle East and South Asia. It just has to become Jewish. In fact. he tells us.

For a moment. to a far lesser degree. as Muslim dynasties tumbled over each other. over the past fifteen centuries. so the brief nine-year reign of the Abbasid caliph Mu‘tasim is known only for its “inquisition” (2005: 140). In fact. the good guys in this narrative. and are placed in opposition to the clerical order of the Ulama. he writes that “put simply [the umma] is the Church in Islam” (2005: 146). individual liberties. but only to transition to political Islam (2005: 218–19) and not to investigate the premise that Sufism could be more than private mysticism. Love is the agent of creation” and that they “understood Muhammad in the same way that many Christian Gnostics understood Jesus: as the eternal logos” (2005: 215). in virtually every section one turns to in Aslan’s book. Or when Aslan describes the umma. Muslim kings were crowned and dethroned. and often profoundly traditionalist group of men who. (2005: 139)
The arrogance of this approach. Aslan’s view of a singular Ulama deciding the worldly fates of believers sounds a lot like the history of Christianity in Europe. summarizing the sweep of fifteen hundred years of human history within a few words. which is put this way: “European ideals of secularism. social. As a result. and. Sufis and the Indian reformer Sayyid Ahmed Khan are. rigid. only the Ulama. Aslan’s examination of political Islam itself is preceded by a brief discussion of colonialism. in their capacity as the link to the traditions of the past. the comparison to Christianity is drawn. consider themselves to be the unyielding pillars upon which the religious. and they certainly complicate Aslan’s narrative. Moreover. for one thing?) The idea of a clergy tyrannically holding sway over the masses of people flies in the face of the complex and variegated ways authority and state power have functioned throughout the history of the Muslim world. consider Sufism with more than pacific new-age appreciation. Many of the often quite violent and often very hierarchical anti-colonial struggles the Arab world witnessed—ranging from the Mahdi movement in Sudan to Abdel Kader in Algeria—were Sufi-led or -inspired. Islam as we know it has been almost exclusively defined by an extremely small. and Islamic parliaments elected and dissolved. (Not to say historically untenable—what about popular Islam. democracy—that
. have managed to retain their self-imposed role as the leaders of Muslim society. we are told that “Sufis” believe that “God’s very essence—God’s substance—is love. Sometimes it is explicit. for better or worse.The God That Failed
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Throughout Islamic history. human rights. is at bottom breathtakingly simple. unsurprisingly. Sufis are compared to Teresa of Avila. The text does acknowledge Shah Wali Allah’s political Sufism. But besides sounding very much like contemporary Iran. and political foundations of the religion rest. pluralism. peacefully opposed to the black-robed Ulama.

More-
. that “Islam” is a victimizer of the West ends Aslan’s narrative. Aslan concludes. But a problem arises when analogy overwhelms the analysis to the point of emulation. Islam will always fail. which refutes the “clash of civilizations thesis” in its analysis of the September 11 terrorist attacks.” he continues. we are told that this is a book that will explain not just a faith system but the paroxysms of the world. one that is putatively about the world. This is a false dichotomy if ever there was one—to be forced to choose between a civilizational clash and an internal. bloody. civilizational civil war—for why can’t it be neither? But the idea that the West is “merely a bystander” and. by extension. “some more fiercely than others. “What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims. In Aslan’s narrative. took fifteen vicious. with its incomplete reformation. In many ways. exactly as in the Christian past. In Aslan’s narrative. as if the ravages of colonialism are due to the arrested development of the colonized themselves. The “story” of Islam.” he writes (so “lesser” religions don’t?). More troubling still is the manner in which politics is subsumed to the narrative of Islam. The violence of our age is due to a struggle over leadership. for the simple fact that Islam is not Christianity. These consistently drawn parallels between “East” and “West” structure Aslan’s story. there is nothing wrong with analogy or drawing historical correspondences as a heuristic device. .90
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wonderful legacy of the Enlightenment that had taken hundreds of years to evolve in Europe—were pressed upon the colonized lands with no attempts to render them in terms the indigenous population would either recognize or understand” (2005: 222–23). One need only recall Europe’s massively destructive Thirty Years’ War . . And Islam has finally begun its fifteenth century” (2005: 248). . Of course. and occasionally apocalyptic centuries. “All great religions grapple over [authority]. “is merely a bystander” (2005: 248). . and from the opening pages of the book—a narration of how Aslan mediated and translated a sudden altercation between American missionaries and an irate Muslim conductor on a train in Morocco—to the ending. responsibility becomes easy to assess. is the sole cause of today’s violence. and [led] ultimately to the doctrinal relativism of the Enlightenment. . . it is as if “Islam” must follow the same world historical script as Christianity. This remarkable evolution in Christianity . . “not an external battle between Islam and the West. to recognize the ferocity with which interreligious conflicts have been fought in Christian history.” he writes. . Under such a weight. the Thirty Years’ War signaled the end of the Reformation . The West. .

for ijtihad brings with it reformation. for it enables precisely this kind of wholesale summary of the complexity of human experience. and others who describe their excited journeys into Communism and their disillusioned return. one similarly made more concrete by the collapsing of distance.” The truth of the proposition is made all the more “truthful” when it issues from the lips of Western Muslims. In 1949. mainly by its collective belief that—as Arthur Koestler put it—Communism is “the
. Judaism. is anti-modern to the core. Richard Wright. The narratives of Aslan. In their repeated insistence on a system of tyranny defeating human liberty.” an Islam that for centuries has been on the march to defeat individuality at every turn. Stephen Spender. it is the central thread that connects Aslan to Hirsi Ali to Irshad Manji. since it is ex–fellow travelers who tell them. and individuality. this is an oddly comforting story. and has a totalitarian-like Comintern at its heart called “the Ulama. I am referring to familiar Cold War narratives published in the middle of the twentieth century. Hirsi Ali. meaning now the Western world. To Western audiences. specific colonial and postcolonial policies. if one can be found. supported by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. however. or Christianity (or. And the solution. is simplistically plotted as a stripped-down ijtihad. The process of assigning political responsibility means assessing who. and everything else. as Frances Stonor Saunders shows. Ignazio Silone. a wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. Orientalism provides the means by which these narratives succeed. in the case of Thomas Friedman. and particularly the confessional tales composed by ex-Communists. individually. state-building projects. But surely this is ridiculous. regionalism. most notably that Communism defeats every ounce of individuality. Such epic civilizational narratives as these talk the language of political responsibility while obfuscating the same. military pacts.The God That Failed
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over. has been invaded by “Islam. does what to whom. Arthur Koestler. But Orientalism does not account for the overarching structure of these three stories. on the other hand. Richard Crossman edited an influential series of essays with the title The God That Failed. these stories fundamentally replicate another narrative in our recent history. and Irshad Manji. The narratives in the book share a good many characteristics. control over resources. It means grappling with the historical details of particular wars. the rise of secular nationalism. It means that the world. reduce politics to the spurious fact that Muslims are agents of Islam and only of Islam throughout the pages of history. It is Orientalism that endows one with the authority to proclaim the wish that “Islam” would become or emulate atheism. The God That Failed features essays by André Gide. Reprinted through the 1960s and. globalization. that Islam would finally just become Hinduism). liberalism.

Similarly. In The God That Failed. ed. James L. Hallaq. The God That Failed. J. September 2. Ignazio Silone characterizes the history of the Communist International (sounding very much like these accounts of Islam) as “a history of schisms. Bakhsh. New York: Bantam Books. Reza. “The Authenticity of Prophetic Hâdith: A Pseudo-Problem. 2007. how they are consistent.” The Muslim World 6(1): 79–81. . It is far less important to adjudicate the truth of these claims than it is to connect old rhetorics of persuasion and argument to newer rhetorics.
Works Cited
An Indian Convert. Communism loses because it turns ideology into religion.” The Muslim World 6(4): 389–93. The Communist novice. With this in mind. New York: Random House. a history of intrigues and arrogance . Richard. “A Mohammedan Imam’s Discovery of Christ.” writes Crossman in his introduction. 1916.” Studia Islamica 89: 75–90. “The strength of the Catholic Church. The failures of Communism spelled out in The God That Failed are likened to the failures of organized religion. and how they differ. 1949. Communism. one crucial comparison arises. “has always been that it demands the sacrifice of [spiritual] freedom uncompromisingly. promotes liberty. “How Christ Won My Heart. 1926. toward every independent expression of opinion” (1949: 89). because “our” violence.” New York Times Magazine.
. the acolyte of Lenin was seen as being the same as the Catholic neophyte. subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin. like organized religion (especially Catholicism). flees from freedom and defeats the individual.” The Muslim World 16(1): 79–84. A. In the hands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The existence of this old narrative endows contemporary tales of “Islam” with the “truthfulness” on which they rest. wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom” (1949: 6). in this mythology. and Future of Islam. Barton. and Reza Aslan. 1999. while “their” violence is forever atavistic. “Islam” fails because it has transformed religion into ideology. “The Former-Insurgent Counterinsurgency. Irshad Manji. . allowing us to see how certain tropes function in our society.92
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incarnation of the will of History itself” (1949: 58). 2005. Evolution. and condemns spiritual pride as a deadly sin. Communism is a bullying. No god but God: The Origins. In The God That Failed. Wael B. felt something of the release which Catholicism brings to the intellectual. Gordon. anti-human pursuit recklessly imposing its idea of Truth on the world through brutality (Wright) and murder (Spender). Crossman. Aslan. 1916. Michael R. “The Story of My Conversion.

the party was described by major U. Yet what is meant by this term differs almost as widely as those who invoke it.2 Everything from cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to racist fears of unemployed Muslim youth to the ever-present nomenclature of “terrorism” is subsumed in this fluid category of discrimination. First.S. by bringing a transnational feminist analytic lens to bear on these images and discourses. Hizbullah. many of whom are supporters of the Lebanese Shi‘i political party.” a term used by journalists. This shift is symptomatic of what is often described as a growing “Islamophobia.3 Below. news magazine ran a spread focusing on Hizbullah’s social welfare provision networks and entrance into mainstream Lebanese politics.S. scholars. I examine how an awareness of transnational discourses that portray Muslims as universally 94
. Hizbullah has returned to “terrorist” status in these same media and in the rhetoric of U. politicians. In the late 1990s. media outlets as a “guerrilla” movement or a “militia.4
Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia: The Case of Shi‘i Muslim Women in Lebanon
Lara Deeb
In the ten years that I have been conducting field research in the southern suburb of Beirut. In contrast to the European context. Second.” and at least one U. I will complicate this image in three ways. by considering the perspectives of Hizbullah gender activists. most Islamophobic discourses in the United States focus on images of Muslim men and hinge on associations between masculinity and violence.1 In the post-9/11 world. and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. I reinsert Muslim women into the picture. highlighting the importance of ideas about “civilization” and civilizational status—as constructed through women’s roles and bodies—to the construction of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim rhetoric. with its focus on the hijab. there has been a drastic shift in the geopolitical climate in relation to my interlocutors. officials.S.

” I mean to connote a value-laden. “the suburb”—is composed of a series of neighborhoods whose population today is mostly Shi‘i Muslim.
Gender. Discourses originating in the U. In this particular case. Finally. Europe. it prompts questions about who has the authority to define “civilized status” and what signifiers can be used to do so. By “modern” or “modernity.
. Islam.” The appellation is exaggerated: Hizbullah is the most popular and powerful political party in the area. and North America. is crucial. it is the community that bore the brunt of the twenty-two-year Israeli occupation and carried most of the burden of the resistance that brought that occupation to an end in 2000. but they share numerous features with strains of Islamophobic thought now common in Israel. the concept can be reduced to notions of progress in both the spiritual and material realms.S. In addition to evoking the “clash of civilizations” thesis and rhetoric. making Islam the sole source of good. Even when wars are not being actively waged.” usually phrased in Arabic as “we have civilization” (‘indna hadara).4 certain expressions and cultivations of piety have converged in recent decades with particular definitions and expressions of modernity. and Europe that depict Islam as the root of all evil reverberate in Lebanon and produce oppositional responses that invert this equation. It is impossible to talk about Lebanon today without talking about sectarianism and the rise of specifically “Shi‘a-phobic” discourses. people use “modern” almost interchangeably with “civilized” to indicate their placement along a “civilized”–“barbaric” continuum.5 But there is another relevant usage: frequently. referred to in Lebanon simply as al-Dahiya— literally. but by no means are the southern suburbs and the party coterminous. the example of Hizbullah in Lebanon adds yet another layer of complexity to conversations about Islamophobia. Emphasis on the term “civilized. Al-Dahiya is also the area of the capital where entire neighborhoods were destroyed in Israeli bombardment during the July 2006 war. the Shi‘i community that resides here has lived in a situation of chronic military conflict for decades. and Civilizational Status in al-Dahiya
The southern suburb of Beirut. This area of the city is known in the United States and among many Lebanese as “the Hizbullah stronghold. Among pious Shi‘i Muslims living in al-Dahiya. context-derived concept. The latter are particular to Lebanon.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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oppressive to women has contributed to the popularity of a specific sort of Islamophilic discourse within the pious Shi‘i Muslim community in Lebanon.

” In the second. this critique underscores the ways in which women are used. but they are also important thematically in contemporary forms of neoimperialism in the Middle East. in December 1999. as in the reversal of veiling policies in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution. For example. Civilizational status is typically gauged along two dimensions.8
. it is the treatment of women’s bodies that determines the relative position of a culture or society as civilized (cf. And in both cases. and the evaluation of their status. at the borders between civilizational and moral constructs. or the association of women with private.” Gender is implicated here for a number of reasons. among others. Therese Saliba (2002). which underlies the binary distinction between Islam and the West. as in the writings of Egyptian reformer Qasim Amin on women’s education (2000 [1899]). Jarmakani 2008). however. In both cases. which examines how civilizational discourses are dependent on gendered assumptions.96
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Of the many criticisms of the “clash of civilizations” thesis. Widad. civilizational status is measured by movement away from a state of “backwardness” or “barbarism. In examples of the first type. These alliances and implications are familiar to us from postcolonial studies. driven by colonialism.6 Often grounded in histories of colonialism or nationalist movements. domestic culture in the nationalist movement in Bengal (Chatterjee 1993). and civilizational status is measured by the ability to preserve traditions that are considered culturally distinctive. and a “discourse of protection” that creates alliances between white men and women and legitimates their positions as protectors of “free women” (Moallem 2005).7 The belief that it is crucial not only to demonstrate the modernity and civilized status of Islam. to determine a society’s “civilizational status. or in the historical politics of forced unveiling in state modernization programs in Turkey and Iran. Women’s status may be understood to signify the level of developmental progress a nation has achieved. and Lila Abu-Lughod (1998). including the symbolic relationship between woman and nation. ideologies that emphasize women’s role in producing and reproducing communities. I want to highlight a feminist critique made by Minoo Moallem (2005). but to do so by demonstrating the modernity and civilized status of Muslim women is a dominant theme that has emerged again and again in my conversations with pious Shi‘i Muslims—men and women— in Lebanon over the past ten years. toward the beginning of an extended period of field research in al-Dahiya. Women’s status can also signify the preservation of national culture in the face of colonialism. an age-old civilization is seen to be under attack from certain aspects of modernization. in the manner of a barometer. transnational discourses are critical to the placement of women’s bodies.

” there has been an accompanying amplification of the representational concerns of my Lebanese Shi‘i interlocutors. The pious Shi‘i women with whom I worked in al-Dahiya simultaneously articulated this sense of being responsible for representing their community’s civilized status and reproduced the civilizational binarisms upon which their role as signifier rested. my closest friend in the community. favoring instead a response that posits Islam as the only context in which women can truly be free from oppression. Furthermore.S.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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the president of an Islamic women’s organization where I had recently begun volunteering. however. This responsibility entails a reversal of the rhetoric that constructs Muslim women as universally oppressed by Islam. counteracting them in ways that are reshaping everyday belief and practice. and from other communities in Lebanon. I was used to encountering suspicion. the codependence of ideas about being pious and ideas about being modern has emerged in a gendered way. Rather than trying to assess whether I had any ties to espionage or the U. government. While it may seem counterintuitive to describe this response as Islamophilic (because the community that cultivates it is already Muslim). as there has been a resurgence of discourses that equate specific forms of Islam with absolute Otherness and call upon women’s bodies and practices to mark this imagined boundary between “us” and “them. The images of Islam and Muslims produced by Hizbullah activists are meant to be positive and corrective. as Aziza related their conversation to me. conscious response to Islamophobic images emanating both from the U. Widad was trying instead to determine whether I was talking to the “right” people in her community. She wanted to know which other organizations I had gone to and what sort of information I had been receiving about Islam and Muslim women. this descriptor crucially emphasizes the reactive impulses at work. Widad concluded the conversation by emphasizing that she “welcomed the opportunity to show Lara the way that Islam is civilized and how modern our women are. to be considered fully “civilized” or “modern” within the community. one has to demonstrate these qualities in both the material and spiritual registers.” Widad’s concerns are equally present ten years later. they take the hostile views of others into account. contemporary Islamophobic discourses are often built on gendered assumptions and ideas about the status of Muslim women. In part. As a researcher from the United States. In short. It is women who are primarily responsible for demonstrating and inhabiting a moral position related to both states (piety and modernity) in the contemporary world. asked Aziza.
. Indeed. it became clear that this moment was different.S. this model for Muslim womanhood was constructed as a direct. about me. In al-Dahiya.

described by one of my interlocutors as “outspoken. and activism can take place. the public visibility of Shi‘i women marked as pious. and the demonstration of the modern or civilized status of herself and her community to the outside world. urbanization. and they are evaluated in terms of three factors: her contribution to the common good. where they do everything from providing for the basic needs of poor families to leading educational seminars on topics ranging from hygiene to Quranic interpretation to how best to approach the religious court system. and being elected to party committees. committed. The most common and commonly noted aspect of this participation is women’s volunteer work for Islamic social welfare organizations. and the relatively
. especially during Ashura. Indeed. in addition to their growing involvement in fields ranging from medicine to education. education. Women also enter public life by running for local political office. has increased substantially in al-Dahiya since the 1970s.9 In al-Dahiya. return migration. women’s education in hawzas (religious seminaries) and greater participation in religious life. greater educational opportunities for Lebanese women of all confessional communities. generally by their dress but also by comportment and activity. the cultivation of her own piety through public activity. The first is the development of an organizational network through which various forms of work. Muslim. This network represents the institutionalization of a Lebanese Shi‘i Islamic mobilization that began in the 1970s and today is represented most prominently—though not exclusively—by Hizbullah.” In this model. The “new” model of moral womanhood is also related to the political mobilization of Lebanese Shi‘i Muslims as Shi‘i. and educated.98
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Consciously Countering Stereotypes through Muslim Visibility
In its contemporary formations—as in many of its colonial ones—the question of Muslim women’s status has often focused on two related areas: the headscarf and women’s public participation. it is the latter—women’s participation in the public arena—that is the principal concern. Women’s increased participation in public life in these neighborhoods of Beirut is related to two major changes in the Lebanese Shi‘i community over the past several decades. They also participate visibly in communal religious life. The second change is the concurrent development of a “new” model of ideal moral womanhood for pious Lebanese Shi‘i women. working in media. a woman’s piety and her participation in community life are understood as linked. Women’s role as barometer of the community’s status is not the only important factor in this dynamic.

This particular seminar was led by Nayla. Nayla opened the seminar by speaking about the different types of struggle—jihad—women should take part in.” When I asked her where she saw these images. Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. to college graduates in their twenties and thirties. She defined “cultural struggles” as being able to learn about and discuss gender norms from “other societies. she said: “They are everywhere. to show that we can be committed to our religion and be cultured (muthaqqaf ) at the same time. she returned to textual citations from the Quran and hadith. a transnational discursive context in which Islam is depicted as inherently oppressive to women plays a key role in shaping this alternative gender ideology as an Islamophilic response. a series of discussions prior to this one had led to Hizbullah deciding to run a woman on its parliamentary electoral slate. Even here in Lebanon. images that say that we are very oppressed and backward. The twenty participants ranged from women in their forties and fifties who held only high school diplomas.
. including military. and cultural struggles. as well as from the ijtihad. “We see these terrible images of Muslim women. Look at the news. Many women like Widad felt pressure to respond to those stereotypes and drew upon new models of moral womanhood in order to do so. sometimes in opposition to their families’ or husbands’ wishes.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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gender-progressive interpretations of the popular Lebanese marja‘ al-taqlid. It is important that we show people that this is incorrect. and they shared the view that one of the tasks of their activism was to work to change that opposition. As one community activist put it. social. For example. though that decision was later revoked for reasons related mostly to the contingencies of Lebanese politics. In general. At the time. and a few undergraduate students. they were active in their community. Look at CNN. an engineer who had recently left her job at an architectural firm in order to devote more of her time to working directly in politics. Such seminars were common venues for discussions about women’s activism and often worked both to encourage and to facilitate it. she was the president of the party’s Women’s Committee. providing it with an added sense of reactive urgency.”
A Hizbullah Seminar
The process by which oppositional gender discourses emerge can be seen in the example of a seminar about women’s public participation held by the Hizbullah Women’s Committee in 2000. have you ever seen LBC?11 You will never find a woman like me there.” Consistently.10 However.

most women agreed that the contemporary situation in Iran was “better” than what happened in Algeria. patriarchy in Lebanese society and how to teach men to take on more work in the domestic sphere. the need to change laws in Lebanon on issues like childcare. On this occasion. the conversation tacked in myriad ways. “all want to see if Islam is modern. In this regard the seminar discussion shows both how binary civilizational discourses are drawn upon and the points at which those binary distinctions collapse. she opened the seminar to general discussion. as one woman put it. Many participants commented on the interest Western journalists took in “Hizbullah women. maternity leave. and the recent increase in the interest of international journalists in their work. because the examples we have are either of oppressed women or of
. asking what could be done to prevent such a reaction against women’s public role in Lebanon in the event of a just peace with Israel. and they observed that these reporters.100
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or interpretation. This mixed response to Iran is particularly interesting in light of assumptions that Hizbullah merely duplicates Iranian policies or goals. Over the next hour and a half.13 Iran was also raised as an example. Nayla and the other seminar participants called upon the model of ideal Muslim womanhood I described earlier. and several women emphasized its “newness. participants drew on transnational examples to make their points.12 Throughout. In challenging these negative images. especially Ayatullah Ruhullah Khomeini and Fadlallah.” Several of them had been interviewed by foreign reporters. Most relevant to my purposes here are the ways in which transnational discourses about gender norms figured in ideas about the West’s views of Muslim women and ideas about Western women. and citizenship. For instance.” As one of the college students put it: “We have no examples. and points both to the limitations of that relationship and to the diversity of views that do exist among the party’s constituents.” Others noted that this was because people coming from the West all think that Muslim women are “backward and oppressed” (mutakhallif wa mazlum). So what do they do? They look at the women. one to which women in this Lebanese community have complex and varied relationships. including among its many topics possible strategies for facilitating women’s greater role in electoral politics. After about twenty minutes. but “not good enough” in terms of women’s participation in society. of various Shi‘i scholars. women’s participation in the Algerian anti-colonial resistance came up as a classic example from which a lesson was to be learned. A student at the Lebanese University who had been reading about how Algerian women had been “sent home” after the revolution brought this up as a cautionary note.

including societal expectations that they should privilege the domestic realm. and noted that “in the West.” When one participant noted the difficulties women face in working outside the home in Lebanon. we have only half of that.” a monolithic construct that figured as the source
. we have to set a new example for the world. pressure from spouses. Instead. Furthermore. I should emphasize two unarticulated moves that the combination of these various images of Islam and the West made possible. the objectification of women. “setting a new example” for both their peers and the world was highlighted as one of the tasks participants would take with them. Here. “In the West. all parts of society are working. This seemingly straightforward “Islam is the solution” response was further complicated by the discussion the participants had about “the liberated Western woman.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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Western women. women don’t have this problem. saying. but “Eastern society. women and men are standing together. one of the older women in the group stepped in and corrected the student sharply. she was also suggesting that these were not mutually exclusive perspectives. “But don’t forget. and the gossip of neighbors and relatives. and the isolation of individuals from their family or social contexts—all tendencies that lead to a deterioration of moral values. While she was partly trying to smooth over a minor disagreement that signaled both generational and educational differences. at the close of the seminar. a figure that saturated revolutionary discourse in the Iranian context. participants in the Hizbullah seminar echoed elements of a notion of “Westoxication.” highlighting especially the ideas that the West stands for rampant consumerism. we are a society that is missing half of our potential. They work with two teams.” Perhaps the most commonly cited instance of this construct is the “Westoxicated” woman. in these seminar discussions.”15 Before moving on. this “new example” was to be set by their visibility in the public sphere specifically as pious Muslim women.” Another woman concurred. First. Yet on the other hand. she concluded. Indeed. Nayla cited the beauty of ijtihad in Shi‘i Islam. making the common observation that ijtihad was what made it possible to adapt models like Zaynab’s to contemporary society.” Following a silence that seemed longer than it probably was. we have Sayyida Zaynab [sister of Imam Husayn] and all the women of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt). But this new example was one inspired by models like Zaynab and located in a belief that Islam provides the only real space for women’s freedom from oppression.14 On the one hand.” At this point.” a construct that is often just as monolithic as that of “the oppressed Muslim woman. several women in the group presented a more ambivalent relationship to the “Western woman. the opposite of the West was never Islam per se.

these binarized constructions served also to mask complex histories of feminist movements and gender activism in Muslim societies. the general sense in al-Dahiya is that both the public visibility of pious women and the imperative to actively address the negative stereotypes that are part of Islamophobia have increased. in a conversation about local responses to the women-run organization where she worked.
. and she expressed new suspicions that the interviewers themselves “already knew what they were looking for” or were uninterested in genuine dialogue. She had numerous reasons for this stance. an activist told me that she hoped the organization would provide evidence of women’s public capabilities. “the West” was itself represented by other communities in Lebanon. “Our nursery is being spoken of as the best nursery in all of Beirut. Second. not even only al-Dahiya. to which I will return below. Outside the Hizbullah seminar. She then showed me clips of an al-Jazeera English special on “Hizbullah women” in which she had recently taken part. For some of my interlocutors. She also complained that the questions she was asked had become repetitive and were often too simplistic. ‘Wow. Nayla said that she still thought it was very important to use the media as much as possible to confront stereotypical images.’” Her use of the phrase “Muslim. but they understand. including changes in her work schedule and responsibilities within the party and her desire to be viewed as a political figure regardless of her sex. People from all over walk in to see. For example. too. it was local responses with which women were concerned. A different volunteer with the same organization told me about the nursery they ran. there is a particular negative stereotype associated with Shi‘ism and al-Dahiya. On other occasions. they are educated. including Lebanon. they have awareness. and they are surprised. pious Shi‘i women frequently expressed an acute understanding of the importance of women’s status to perceptions of the level of civilization characteristic of a people or place. she said that she had decided to stop granting interviews to anyone who was interested in talking about “Hizbullah women.” though she continued to communicate with a few journalists via e-mail. And in Lebanon. and each works in conjunction with the other in various ways. Despite her newfound reluctance to deal directly with journalists. They say. Local and transnational discourses are not unrelated. these are Muslims. During a conversation I had with Nayla in 2007. that are not simply impositions or contaminations from the West. saying.102
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of patriarchal oppression. Since 2001. but” is indicative of the extent to which she and other volunteers have encountered and confronted negative stereotypes about their religious community in local Lebanese discourses.

“know what the rest of the world is discovering: The brutal oppression of women is the central goal of the terrorists” (quoted in Abu-Lughod 2002). Even David
. given the long history of such discourses. a figure that emerged most strikingly in the Bush administration’s rhetoric justifying the U. It has employed numerous pious women who were unable to find employment in media in other parts of Beirut due to anti-Muslim discrimination. and new relationships to information and ideas. Hizbullah itself has built a sophisticated. Electronic media and satellite television in particular contribute to the production of different kinds of public spheres.S. neoimperialism in its multiple phases. One question that arises. is what.17 One of the most common images of Muslim women purveyed in relation to specifically U. including works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji (see chapter 3).S. support for the regime in Afghanistan prior to September 11. Islamophobic and Islamophilic ones alike. is different about contemporary discourses that rest in part on gendered distinctions.S. contemporary circulations are heavily mediated. despite U. Islamophobic Discourses
Lebanese Shi‘i women’s engagements with transnational discourses about Muslim women are a contemporary example of how ideas about women and gender norms are used to establish boundaries between binarized civilizational constructs. In a radio address on November 17. military. thereby “saving” them from both the Taliban and their burkas. The second potential difference may stem from the varying contingencies of European colonialisms versus U. Gendered. First Lady Laura Bush cast the invasion as a mission to bring civilization to Afghan women. adding new circuits of knowledge production to engagements with gender and other discourses. Over the past two decades. military in the role of protector and liberator of women.S. This observation placed the U.16 Shi‘i Lebanese women respond in part to images of Muslim women they see on CNN International and the BBC. One possibility is that the circulation of discourses itself differs. power is that of the oppressed woman in need of liberation by the U. if anything.18 “Afghan women. invasion of Afghanistan.” she claimed. 2001. While transnational discourses about Islam and Muslim women are clearly not new. media-savvy information production and distribution network that selectively targets various Lebanese and international audiences.S.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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Complicating Contemporary. and Azar Nafisi.S. and they confront those images in part through their work with al-Manar—Hizbullah’s television station—and al-Jazeera. We can also look to recent trends in popular literature purporting to “expose” the status of women in Muslim communities.

government’s complicity in the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon was not justified with explicit mentions of Muslim women or Islam as such.” Lest Nayla’s fears seem conspiratorial. hatemongering Terrorism Awareness Project highlights “the status of Muslim women” in its efforts.S.” In the Lebanese case.104
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Horowitz’s conservative. Israeli) military intervention is then portrayed as terrorists hiding behind “helpless women and children. (or in this case. In the fall of 2007 academic inboxes were flooded with e-mails warning scholars of the “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” that the organization was promoting. the U. Armed opposition to U.” Attendees at this conference “examined the traditions within Muslim society that prevent women from obtaining work and education outside the home and what the
. article in the Jerusalem Post that I received in my e-mail from two other women in al-Dahiya. This imagery is critical to the context in which Shi‘i women’s public participation is viewed as proof of their community’s status. “a former head of the Mossad and the National Security Council.” which again reinforces the idea that certain women require rescue from their own (Muslim) men.” Several women’s studies departments across the U. When I asked Nayla why she thought there was so much interest among journalists and others in Hizbullah women. because usually when they want to attack any group. However.S. in part to a sense that Hizbullah women were more visibly active than women in other Islamic movements. she answered that this was related in part to a general interest in the party. power is negotiated in Lebanon and elsewhere. demanding departmental statements on “Muslim women’s oppression. Among the suggested events for conservative student organizations to sponsor were a “teach-in on the oppression of women in Islam” and “sit-ins in Women’s Studies departments to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.” a center directed by Ephraim Halevy. consider a May 31. and in part because “even the spies and/or informers (mukhabarat) are working on this topic. they study its details and especially about its women.” described a conference “on the empowerment of Arab women at the Hebrew University’s Shasha Center for Strategic and Policy Studies.S. 2007.S. a civilizational discourse in which Muslim women play a key representative role remains a major subtext in the dynamics by which U.S. The article. in the role of male savior. were bombarded with requests from students who appeared to be foot soldiers in this campaign. “Empowered Women Could Combat Islamic Extremism. as well as two colleagues in the U. This type of gender construction legitimates military adventure by dividing the world along a binary axis and granting those deemed “civilized” the right to “bring” civilization to those who are not so deemed by whatever means necessary.

This Sunni-Shi‘i rift in Lebanon has been explained in the U. economic policies. who were eager to distance themselves from Hizbullah. they are not conflicts about religious difference per se. as the inevitable result of age-old sectarian conflicts. and political representation. Throughout this period. where Hizbullah secretary general Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah attained rock star status. arms held by nearly every political party in the country. economic. with both sides in the internal Lebanese conflict claiming moral high ground by asserting their “civilized” status. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of this conflict is over alliance with or opposition to U.
. this particular sectarian fault line is relatively new to Lebanese politics.19 Furthermore.S. a discourse of what might be called “Shi‘a-phobia” has been revitalized in Lebanon.20 The picture is complicated further when one steps out of Lebanon and considers responses in the Arab world to Hizbullah during the July 2006 war. pointing to continuities between historical and contemporary colonial gender discourses. After the 2006 war. this rift continued to deepen.S. But these conflicts are political and economic. and military policies in the Middle East. and popular sentiment within the same countries. who are in turn aligned with Syria and Iran.” Not only does this example lend credence to Nayla’s fears.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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Israeli government could do in this area. One of the effects of the July 2006 war was to polarize a rift between Hizbullah and the majority in the Lebanese government that had been gradually growing since the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. press.S. political. corruption. Jordan). triggering strikes and protests. (Saudi Arabia. and it runs through a wide variety of issues. with differences laid onto the lines of religious identity. the withdrawal of Hizbullah and allied ministers from government. and brief periods of internal violence. conflict over presidential and parliamentary elections. Once again. but it also demonstrates how such ideas circulate.
Shi‘a-phobia
Thinking about Lebanon in relation to discussions of Islamophobia opens up another layer of complexity within these contemporary political-discursive dynamics. who are carefully aligned with the United States and Saudi Arabia against Hizbullah and other opposition parties. A divide emerged between Sunni Arab governments allied with the U. as has the violence in Iraq. Here the binary distinction between “us” and “them” is applied to the government majority and its allies. including support for Hizbullah’s military resistance wing. civilizational rhetoric is used to draw the lines.

Fears of a “Shi‘a takeover” of Lebanon have become a sentiment all too commonly expressed among supporters of the majority in government.” Similar statements. can be found in the “Statement Calling on Feminists to End Their Silence on the Oppression of Women in Islam. much of this discourse is built on gendered stereotypes. today around the “specter” of Iran. whether Sunni or Christian. things look slightly different. dinnertime commentary in the households of governmentmajority supporters characterized the Hizbullah-led sit-in in downtown Beirut with a plethora of references to “dirt” and “smells” brought into the area and the “contamination” of what had been an upper-class space of business and leisure.S. Just as we see gendered anti-Islam discourses emerging in the U. Once again. are similarly inflected and focused. and insisting that only the beach monitored by Fadlallah’s office is appropriate for Muslims. why are they wearing them here? See. and Iran.S. such commentary is also a reflection of class differences between supporters of the government majority and members of the opposition. “That’s how they get them to all wear those abayas. “They will force everyone to veil. most prominently in accusations of terrorism. assumptions and stereotypes about Shi‘i Islam have echoed many of the tropes found in other Islamophobic discourses.106
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Within Lebanon.S. statements about Shi‘i Muslims.21 Lebanese Shi‘i Muslims are accused of “really being Iranians. In 2007. they’re not Arab. you’ll see. despite the Lebanese army’s 2007 battle with a Sunni Islamist group in the north of the country (Fath al-Islam).S. In both Lebanon and the U. in particular in Lebanon. Instead. “They brainwash their women” was a common refrain. which locates the beginnings of what he calls Islamo-Fascism in the Islamic revolution in Iran.
. Obviously. the rhetoric of Shi‘i Lebanese leaders tends to emphasize coexistence and the importance of Islamic unity in the face of U. the idea that Islam is inherently oppressive to women is centered in part on political conflict between the U. many young women have stopped visiting an all-women’s beach in the (historically Sunni) “other part” of the city. and tends to present conflict between Sunni and Shi‘i in Lebanon as instigated by the U.” Or. as a Sunni-identified acquaintance said to me. claiming it is not really shar‘i (in keeping with Islamic law). finding new fault with it.” “Abayas are Iranian dress anyway.. This is underscored further by the fact that anti-Shi‘i discourses have not been met thus far with specifically Sunni-phobic discourses in Lebanon. On the ground. at least not in the public arena.” not only in terms of imagined loyalties but literally in terms of race. In al-Dahiya. especially around forced veiling. imperialism.S.” written by David Horowitz’s Terrorism Awareness Project (2007).

without casting the Sunni beach in particularly derogatory terms. Note that I use the phrase “pious Shi‘i community” or “pious Shi‘i Muslims” as a gloss for those who identify with certain ideologies and practices of piety centered around Hizbullah and the prominent religious scholar Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah.lebanon. 4. and Islamophilic discourses. betraying far more complex political contingencies and relationships. both occasions when Shi‘i acquaintances wryly cited the Prophet’s wife Aisha (who led a battle against Imam Ali) as an example of why Sunni Lebanese politician Bahia Hariri should not be allotted so much power. 2000. For example. April 19. and unearthing some of the possibilities that lie in the gray spaces between.” Christian Science Monitor. p. Ilene R.2/index. Through their circulations. See also CNN’s report from April 1. and that the rationale for this distinction emphasizes the young women’s own standards of piety. Prusher. see Frances Hasso (2005) for a discussion of Israeli associations of Palestinian masculinity with violence in this vein and of its exceptions. Both Hizbullah women’s engagements with transnational discourses and the current political fracturing of Lebanon highlight several ways in which pro.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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This avoidance suggests that a sectarian spatial divide has reemerged in Beirut. nor is sect by any means a fixed category. Thanks to Esra Özyürek. “Lebanon Rejects Israeli Pullback Plan. 2.cnn. Hizbullah Charms Lebanon. 1. I would suggest that a gendered reading of these discourses is necessary to understanding the complexity of their reemergence and deployment in the contemporary political moment. often in ways that reflect political differences unrelated to religion.com/WORLD/9804/01/israel . 1998. “Through Charity. I encountered two exceptions to this in 2007. Indeed.and anti-Muslim constructs depend on a binary civilizational construct that can be shaped and deployed by various actors. we see gendered assumptions underlying Islamophobic.html. Not all pious Shi‘is in Lebanon fit this description.22 In all these examples. Hizbullah women’s relationships to prevailing ideas about Muslim and Western women also underscore how the simplistic binaries on which these concepts are built often collapse. 3. See Andrew Shyrock’s introduction to this volume for a useful overview. Shi‘a-phobic. ideas and policies originating in the West influence how Islam is drawn upon and put to use by Shi‘i Muslims in Lebanon and how those responses are viewed by other Lebanese.
. For example.” available at http://www. Becky Tolen.
Notes
Portions of this article appear in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Deeb 2009). Andrew Shryock. 1. and participants at the Islamophobia/Islamophilia conference at the University of Michigan for comments.

5. Ahmed 1992. religion. 7. Note that this increased interest in Hizbullah was before September 11. All names are pseudonyms. race. as well as a discussion of the ways “civilization” operates as a value-laden term in relation to notions of modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment. see Moallem (2005).” 11. the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. See. 14. and later made popular by leftist intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmed in his book of the same title. El Guindi 1999. at least in terms of media coverage. today most obviously with regard to U. This particular transnational parallel is a common one among women activists in the Middle East. 12. post-civil-war status to the international community. Scholars who are thus emulated are called marja‘ al-taqlid. See Deeb (2006) for a detailed elucidation of this argument. 6. “source of emulation. prevalent among colonialists and nationalists alike.S. is a Christian television station in Lebanon. but to the ways in which we can attend to our interlocutors’ engagements with discourses that emerge in and travel through transnational contexts of power. Such a framework is also attentive to the articulations of gender. in al-Dahiya interested in the non-military aspects of the party. was rapidly reversed. For discussion of “Westoxication. and class within these transnational relations of power. for example.
. While I hesitate to reify September 11 as an absolute before/after break. 10. capitalism.” What had been the beginnings of a move in a different direction. and was part of a move in the U. literally. see Makdisi (2000). For a detailed discussion of the “clash of civilizations” thesis and various critiques of it.” I am not referring to multi-sited research. see Jarmakani (2008). 13.108
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For more on the fluidity and constructed nature of notions of “sect” and sectarian identity in Lebanon. it was at that point that Hizbullah was returned to the “A-list of terrorism. Practicing Shi‘i Muslims choose a religious scholar who has attained a certain rank in jurisprudential learning to follow or emulate on religious matters. Hizbullah itself was consciously working to capitalize on this interest and present its legitimized. that women “belong to” the community or nation. 9.S. It is also related to the ways in which women’s bodies are positioned in symbolic battles between colonialist and nationalist movements and to the patriarchal notion. 8. media in the late 1990s to begin to understand Hizbullah as a political party and as a welfare organization.S. The term “Westoxication” (gharbzadagi) was originally coined by Iranian philosopher Ahmed Fardid. MacLeod 1991) and in part to assumptions that public participation is an accurate indicator of women’s status in society. nation. 2001. sexuality.” and there were reporters from the U. interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere.” specifically in relation to women during the Islamic revolution in Iran. This is due in part to the long history of symbolic potency of the headscarf and assumptions about its relationship to limitations or facilitations of women’s public participation (Abu-Lughod 2002. LBC. This notion of transnational feminist analysis builds on the work of Grewal and Kaplan (1994) and Moallem (2005). Strum (1992). and militarism. This was also a moment when Hizbullah’s military activity was described as guerrilla warfare without the word “terrorism. When I refer to “transnational analysis.

In Lebanon. Princeton. Hariri is a Sunni deputy from the south.and anti-U.: Princeton University Press. I use the term “neoimperialism” advisedly. the assassinated prime minister. It is also an assertion that contributes an added importance to pious Shi‘i women’s public participation—emphasizing that it is necessary for the development of their community and underscoring comparison with ideals that are associated with the West. U. There have been several feminist critiques of this address.
. sister of Rafiq Hariri. with similar limitations. the opposite becomes the case. ed.S. 16. global domination. The Christian Lebanese community seems to be divided down the middle in terms of where they are allied. Among its many problems. up as a space of tolerance and acceptance for those deemed moderate by its standards. See Eickelman and Anderson (1999) on the emergence of a new Muslim public sphere that has been facilitated by electronic media. 1998. This assertion contains an echo of the statements of elite Egyptian reformers during British colonialism. 18. especially development discourses and liberal feminist discourses. 21. The contemporary manifestation of this conflict was catalyzed by the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 and by the July 2006 war. like Qasim Amin (2000 [1899]). Sunni Muslims are “good Muslims” and Islamophobia is meant to refer to “Shi‘a” Muslims. setting the U. and does not capture the complexities of U. discourses are implicated in both the construction and the facilitation of this conflict. lines.S.S.
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod. Lila. This political and economic conflict has historical roots in the construction of Lebanon as a nation-state and the marginalization of Shi‘i Muslims within that state. while in Iraq. The Bush administration’s own rhetoric shifted after 2001 to embrace notions of an internal struggle in Islam. 22. “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” (2002). 17. most notably by Lila AbuLughod in her article. which includes an anti-European-imperialism streak and affinities between neoliberal capitalist economies and identity-politics or rightsbased movements (2001: 144–45). Obviously. power as imperial or neoimperial is imprecise. and is also related to the polarization of Lebanon and the Middle East more generally along pro. But placing Lebanon next to Iraq proves to be a puzzle. were made by Lebanese intellectuals and reformers during the nineteenth-century Nahda. and ignores Hizbullah’s role in the political system and social fabric of the country. this strategy ignores Sunni groups affiliated with al-Qaeda that are organizing and active in Lebanon. 19.S. 3–31.Gendering Islamophobia and Islamophilia
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15.” In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. taking to heart Kelly and Kaplan’s cautioning that describing U. 20. N.S. at various times. See Traboulsi (2007: 63–67). “Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions. who used such arguments to argue for unveiling and for women’s education—though not for women’s participation in the political and economic realms.J. Similar arguments. Lila Abu-Lughod.

“Introduction: The Women of Palestine Will Not Be like the Women of Algeria. “Introduction. El Guindi. Islam. N. Traboulsi. “Piety Politics and the Role of a Transnational Feminist Analysis.S. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Campbell. 2007. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. 1992. London: Pluto Press. R. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ed. 2009. Amira. Conn. 1992. Veil: Modesty. Princeton.” In The Women Are Marching: The Second Sex and the Palestinian Revolution. Eickelman. New York: Lawrence Hill Books. 2008. Dale F. Trans. 2002. Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils. 2005. New Haven. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. 1993.J. 2000 [1899]. 2001. and Caren Kaplan.” American Anthropologist 104: 783–90. Calif. Arlene. Amin. and Belly Dancers in the U. Deeb. The Liberation of Women and the New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism. Berkeley. Samiha Sidhom Peterson. Moallem. ed. Harems. Saliba.: Princeton University Press.. eds. 1–23. and Judith Howard. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. 1999. Princeton.J.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (supplement 1): S112–S126.” http://www.” Feminist Review 81: 23–51. N. 2006. 2005. New York: Palgrave. Hasso. and Change in Cairo. History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. and Jon W. “Statement Calling on Feminists to End Their Silence on the Oppression of Women in Islam. Anderson. Berkeley: University of California Press.: Princeton University Press. Kelly. 2000. Fawwaz. Chatterjee. Philippa Strum. Jarmakani. Fadwa. Grewal. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community. Strum. John D. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. 2002. Privacy and Resistance. Berkeley: University of California Press. A History of Modern Lebanon. 1994. Partha. eds. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. ———. Philippa. “Discursive and Political Deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers/Martyrs. Al-e Amad. Terrorism Awareness Project. 2007. trans. Ahmed. Ussama. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Islam. Jalal. Leila.terrorismawareness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1983. Inderpal.org/isla mo-fascism/69/statement-calling-on-feminists-to-end-their-silence-on-the-oppres sion-of-women-in-islam/. Lara.110
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———. Minoo. Accommodating Protest: Working Women. New York: Columbia University Press. MacLeod.: Yale University Press. Theresa Saliba.
. 1999.. Theresa. Qasim. and Martha Kaplan. Carolyn Allen. Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. Makdisi. Frances S.” In Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.: Mizan Press. Oxford: Berg. the New Veiling. Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (Gharbzadegi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Politics. 1991.

5
Bridging Traditions: Madrasas and Their Internal Critics
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Of the many thorny debates on issues relating to “Islam and modernity. Western forms of learning are aimed 111
. and that efforts towards “mixing” the Islamic sciences with modern. often known as madrasas. They have also figured in various ways in much Western commentary on institutions of traditional Islamic learning. 1953)—a noted intellectual of colonial India best known for his English translation of the Quran—put it. as it was in their palmy days” (Ali 1941: 399). which are frequently viewed as sites of illiberal indoctrination. that only a return to the fundamentals of the faith would restore God’s favor to them and empower them in adverse circumstances. if so. Similar concerns have continued to engage the modernizing governing elite of postcolonial Muslim societies as well. Western sciences—be combined with the traditional Islamic sciences and. “to make modern knowledge a living force among Muslims. What sort of education should Muslims receive in order to meet the challenges of changing times and needs? Can “useful education”—usually understood to comprise the modern. as Abdullah Yusuf Ali (d. the ‘ulama. as well as others of a broadly traditionalist intellectual formation. many among the ‘ulama have argued that the sort of virtues Muslims need to cultivate come from the Islamic religious tradition itself and not from the West.” questions of educational reform are among the most contentious. secular. how and in what measure? How should Islam itself be reinterpreted in order to facilitate Muslim adaptation to modern institutions and practices? Such questions were repeatedly asked by Muslim modernists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a prelude to urging their co-religionists. Prominent among those at the receiving end of such questions are the traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars. In response.

secular learning. Many among them have seen efforts toward bringing the Islamic and the modern. and that the two streams ought to continually replenish each other in enabling Muslims to lead lives that are as true to their faith as they are attentive to modern needs. but rather as a necessary condition for its very survival in conditions of modernity. who have sought to build bridges between Islamic and modern.” these traditionally educated scholars reveal a complexity in their discourses—even when they are framed in blandly dichotomous terms—that is seldom recognized in public commentary on the madrasa and related institutions. What accounts for the persistence of the discourse on bringing putatively rival traditions of learning closer together? That is. politics. My purpose here is not. Nor is it to try to differentiate “good” scholars. Yet the ‘ulama of modern times have scarcely been of one mind on whether or how to defend their institutions. that is.1 Neither “friends” of the madrasa in any obvious sense nor its “foes. It is rather to examine some of the ambiguities that inhere in the discourses even of the bridge builders among the traditionalist scholars. to simply document the fact that many of those who derive their authority from their traditionalist intellectual formation are among the severest critics of the sorts of institutions associated with that formation. Assertions of this sort are easily caricatured.112
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ultimately at undermining the ‘ulama’s ability to impart authoritative Islamic learning and thus represent a thinly disguised attack on Islam itself. religious education. however. they have argued that Islam has never countenanced any sharp division between religious and secular learning. or to what degree to open them up to nontraditional forms of learning. and their place in a rapidly changing world?
I
We begin with Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. a Syrian disciple of the famous Egyptian reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. lending themselves to reinforcing the deep misgivings many observers have had about what the madrasa and its stringent constructions of Islam might mean for the world around it. from “bad” ones. those railing against such efforts. 1905) and an influential Salafi journalist and Quran commentator. This chapter examines the views of some of these scholars. 1935). The Salafis have often critiqued the historically articulated Islamic tradition in the interest of reforming Muslim
. does the longevity of this discourse owe itself exclusively to the perceived intransigence of the conservative ‘ulama? And what do this discourse and its ambiguities reveal about contested conceptions of Islam. Against their more conservative critics. secular sciences closer together not as undermining Islam.

2 Indeed. as is the Qatar-based Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi in the contemporary world (cf. He put these credentials to good use in issuing legal opinions (fatwas)—regularly published in his journal. they had also dulled people’s mental faculties. Rida insisted. was an eminently “rational” religion. and even insisted on approaching the foundational texts through the hermeneutical lenses provided to them by those masters. continually evaluated in light of the foundational texts. al-Manar—and in his Quran commentary. Yet he continued to also insist on his distance from al-Azhar—his intellectual independence of the sort of tradition he took the Azhar ‘ulama to represent. Unlike ‘Abduh. Rida was not educated at al-Azhar. as well as with the ways of other pious forebears (al-salaf al-salih). and it had nothing to fear from the modern sciences. like ‘Abduh. The ‘ulama had not only obstructed the free flow of God’s guidance to the ordinary believers. to those seeking to reinterpret Islam in view of what they see as modern challenges. Islam. for those committed to it ranked the views of the earlier masters above everything else. he was a lifelong critic. Rida 1934: 139–45]). The ‘ulama. and the various religious and customary practices endorsed or tolerated by the ‘ulama. His intellectual formation was eclectic. The latter are best characterized as “reformist Salafis. as Rida saw it. There are many orientations within the ranks of the Salafis. Despite accusations to the contrary. and of ordering his or her life in accordance with its prescriptions. of which. however. was not principled adherence to the methods and doctrines of earlier scholars but “blind imitation”—a way in which many modernist reformers have commonly interpreted it. Taqlid. found frequent expression in his diatribes on taqlid. He did. the Tafsir al-manar. and he did this with flair. Krämer 2006: 194–95). ranging from those committed to literalist approaches to the Islamic foundational texts and considerable hostility toward the modernization of Muslim societies. challenge his contemporary ‘ulama’s claims as gatekeepers of this tradition. It was strategically important to flaunt his scholarly credentials in engaging with the Azhar establishment. Rida’s view of what was wrong with his fellow ‘ulama.” ‘Abduh and Rida are among the most important representatives of this trend. yet it was sufficiently traditional to provide him with the credentials of an ‘alim (plural: ‘ulama [cf. Rida did not wish to discard the Islamic scholarly tradition any more than ‘Abduh had.Bridging Traditions
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beliefs and practices by radically realigning them with the teachings of the Quran and the normative example of the Prophet Muhammad. And he thought that everyone was capable of independently reflecting on the Quran. it was tantamount to idolatry. He wanted to see the scholarly tradition.
. as well as his own much-vaunted sense of intellectual independence.

and the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh. in its political and communal life. their virtues and their actions. Speaking at Aligarh. he was no less harsh in his assessment of the westernizing Muslims (al-mutafarnijun). had constructed barriers to the acquisition of modern learning and to combining it with the proper study of Islam. a college established by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. The rapid spread [of Islam] in its early days was due only to the excellence of its adherents. action. Rida considered many of them to be apostates (malahida). At their hands. the westernizing Muslims were equally blind in their devotion to European models. . If only we had held fast to its bond (‘urwa) and guarded its normative example (sunna). Rida thought. knowledge. . such people did not realize that religious beliefs had a crucial social role. In the process. . they had undermined the interests of Islam.114
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however. than the Muslims of India. that without it people would no longer adhere to social and moral norms (Rida 1912c: 578–80). . the Dar al-‘Ulum of the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow. . whose adherents. . If they were to revive Islam amongst themselves. were a bad advertisement for Islam. No Muslim nation is more in need of religion. Far from attracting people to it. just as they had obstructed the study of the Quran itself. typically placed their particularistic interests far above the common good of Muslims. including the Dar al-‘Ulum of Deoband. Nor
. he blamed the ‘ulama for what he saw as the sorry state of Islam in India:
We Muslims have become an argument against our religion on account of the innovations (bida‘) and the superstitions (kharafat) that have become widespread amongst us. . under the leadership of squabbling ‘ulama. the Muslim community had come to be divided into rival doctrinal orientations and rigid schools of law. he had visited India and spoken at a number of educational institutions there.3 It was not just the ‘ulama of al-Azhar that were to blame. and unity. Rida 1912b: 337)
But if Rida was unsparing in his critique of the ‘ulama. cf. it would have spread to the East and the West. though it was these that Rida knew best. they were helpless in preventing Muslims from turning away from Islam under the impact of Westernization and at the hands of the Christian missionaries. 1898) in 1875 to provide English education to the Muslims of India. Quite apart from questions of the veracity of religion. the heathen majority will turn into a minority and the Muslim minority will turn into a majority. who believed that “religion in this age did not go together with politics. . I will say more about these institutions later in this chapter. The ‘ulama. (Rida 1912c: 583. In 1912. We have reached such a low point in our decline that the heathens (wathaniyyun) in these lands are now more advanced than Muslims in matters of knowledge. . and civilization” (Rida 1923: 62). Just as the unreconstructed ‘ulama blindly followed past authorities.

in which knowledge is sought only for employment in the judiciary. never laying their eyes upon a learned guide and educator who might attend to them with instruction and advice. . The Muslim community has seen no reform emerge from such students. the Madrasat al-da‘wa wa’l-irshad. in their upbringing and their morals.Bridging Traditions
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did these imitators of “foreign traditions and innovations” (al-taqalid wa’l-bida‘ al-ghariba [Rida 1912c: 585]). capable of stemming what he saw as the insidious threat of Christian missionaries in Muslim societies. except under severe duress” (Rida 1912c: 586). it has seen numerous ills in the students of such schools. manners. Rida wanted to see the emergence of a new elite that would provide both religious and political leadership to the community.” he told his audience at the westernizing AngloOriental College at Aligarh. even in favor of what is better. and committed to rebuilding the community’s religious foundations. for they don’t give up any of their habits and traditions. ties that accord neither with their religion nor with their history. As for the religious schools. As he had put it in explaining his vision for this madrasa:
One of the things that afflict Islam [today] is the lack of a group among its adherents which is devoted to general religious guidance for the Muslims as had existed among our pious forebears (salafina al-salih) and as they exist in other communities. or as teachers. as muftis. and a chronic lack of funds). Rida had helped found an educational institution. there is anarchy among Muslims in matters of their religion. Instead. “the English provide you a lesson unmatched by any other. through the preachers trained at this madrasa. . . Consequently. He offered some of his most sustained reflections on this subject in The Caliphate. Some among them remain ignorant. they. have turned into worldly schools. to subvert the Ottoman caliphate. for all their small numbers. . (Rida 1912a: 924)
Though this madrasa proved short-lived (closing its doors in 1915. see that Western nations had continued to remain committed to their norms: “In their character and their morals. . In the classical Sunni constitutional theory. who had blissfully abandoned their mores. others go to Christian missionary schools or government schools to acquire their knowledge.4 Rida would continue to devote his considerable energy to visualizing a new religious and political elite for Muslim societies. Already in 1912. the election of the caliph has been entrusted to an indeterminate group of
. in the face of opposition from many ‘ulama. In the space bounded by these two extremes. such as the Christian monks and priests. a treatise that he published on the eve of the demise of the Ottoman caliphate in 1923. accusations that Rida was somehow trying. and morals. from their divisiveness to their bad morals to their calls to [particularistic] . in Cairo to train a corps of religious guides actively engaged with the affairs of the community.

be knowledgeable of the community’s political. Medieval jurists differed on who made up this select group: leading religious scholars. . and intellectually vibrant path. Consequently.
the ahl al-hall wa’l-‘aqd are the elite (sarat) of the community. legal. one with credible claims to religious authority yet independent of the traditional religious scholars.and university-educated Islamists of a later generation with the difference. . administrative. . Qaradawi has long argued for a new kind of religious intellectual. acquiring there all that they needed to provide religious and political leadership to the community at large. The caliph himself would come from within the ranks of such intellectuals. When this segment of the community is in good order. that Rida’s intellectuals would not be mere autodidacts in religious matters. .5 Like Rida. arguably the most influential of the Sunni ‘ulama in the contemporary Muslim world. however. It has also remained elusive. To Rida. and that they be people of probity. social. While the caliphate was not resuscitated. Later scholars have remained uncertain about whether Rida intended his caliph to exercise any real authority or if he was meant to serve largely as a symbol of the global Muslim community. . of considered judgment. it is the new religious intellectuals who were to play the key role in reorienting Islam and Muslim societies toward a politically independent. Rida’s vision of a new kind of religious intellectual. (Rida 1923: 58)
Rida was calling here for nothing less than a new kind of public and religious intellectual. its notables and its chiefs—people whom the community trusts in matters of knowledge. action.
II
Among Rida’s many admirers is Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. .116
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people often referred to as the ahl al-hall wa’l-‘aqd—“those who loosen and bind” the public affairs of Muslims. and public interest . people who wielded political and military power. one that bridged religious and worldly knowledge and combined religious authority with social and political standing. . speaks “the
. the elite among them were to be educated at an educational institution specifically designed for them. one who combines Islamic and modern forms of knowledge. . religiously unified. and of sagacity. and whom it follows in whatever they decide as regards religious and worldly affairs. Islamic reform requires that Islam’s ahl al-hall wa’l-‘aqd be people self-sufficient in their knowledge of the shari‘a. Either way. the condition of the community at large and of its rulers is also sound. 1926). and financial interests. has not ceased to resonate in many circles. This vision anticipates the college. Rather. or some combination of the two.

where he had tried to foster an educational system that “combined the old and the new. . the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia and the first rector of the then newly founded Islamic University of Medina. . which. If he is destined to preach or to issue fatwas. This vision has continued to guide him. Qaradawi says. Qaradawi exemplifies it much more than Rida. The objective of the latter program. to “produce a Muslim legal scholar who. is to “prepare graduates who are intellectually. We cannot but live in our own age . Though Qaradawi celebrates Rida for having enunciated the “golden rule” that “we should cooperate in matters on which we agree and excuse one another in things about which we disagree” (Qaradawi 1991: 100.” in self-conscious contrast to those given to extremes of different kinds. as well as the aspiration that “it would combine traditional authenticity and the contemporary. Qaradawi speaks with much pride of his directorship. and who kept one eye on the sacred law and tradition (al-shar‘ wa’l-turath) and the other on the present age and the existing reality .” (Qaradawi 2002–2006. 3: 39). . In April 2007. he should be knowledgeable about the world of those to whom he preaches and he should be able to speak to them in their language.
. This has had much to do. 3: 390–91). when asked. cf. of course. houses a number of educational institutions. methodologies and principles to modern problems and challenges and their solutions” (Gulf Times 2007). morally. gave fatwas on the basis of [sound] knowledge. . While Rida had spent a great deal of his energy dueling with al-Azhar and trying to sidestep or subvert that institution. Qaradawi announced the establishment of the College of Islamic Studies in Qatar’s Education City. Qatar. and technically capable of relating our Islamic legacy with its texts. For the next twelve years (1977–89). Qaradawi was the dean of the Shari‘a Faculty of the newly founded Qatar University. ‘a true jurist is one who joins the “obligatory” to the “actual. from the school’s inception in the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. 1350) a medieval Hanbali jurist much revered by the Salafis] has said. 2: 441). .” The Shari‘a Faculty itself sought.” As he had put it in 1963 to Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al al-Shaykh. under Qaradawi’s leadership. as Qaradawi has explained it. . . The founding documents of the university had stressed its Islamic character. of the College of Higher Religious Studies in Doha. preached with discernment. The College of Islamic Studies is to offer degrees in “public policy in Islam” as well as in contemporary Islamic law (fiqh). “the student should not live dissociated from his age. 149) and is what Qaradawi calls a “centrist. as its name suggests.Bridging Traditions
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language of the age” (Qaradawi 2000: 143–44. Qaradawi 2002–2006.’” (Qaradawi 2002–2006. . As Ibn al-Qayyim [(d. . Qaradawi has always insisted on the continuing relevance and authority of the ‘ulama.” .

It is also open to those who are highly interested in shari‘ah sciences and Islamic culture and those who have [had] considerable and tangible production [in these sciences]” (IUMS. and “paving the way for the application of the Islamic Shari‘ah system through encouraging contemporary authentic ijtihad . . . in comparative law from the University of London and currently the general secretary of the ‘Ulama Union. a prominent Saudi Salafi
. an Egyptian lawyer with a Ph. The most notable attempt toward the integration of various kinds of Muslim intellectuals into a shared framework is provided by the International Union for Muslim Scholars (al-Ittihad al-‘alami li-‘ulama al-muslimin [hereafter usually referred to as the ‘Ulama Union]). of course. an organization Qaradawi helped found in 2004 with its secretariat in London and. indeed. this organization is open “to scholars who graduated from shari‘ah [faculties] .” article 4). “Constitution. had led an impoverished life. . moreover.” articles 22–27). come from many different walks of life. “stand[ing] up to internal and external destructive trends and promot[ing] Muslims’ public awareness of their Ummah’s role and noble goals”. And it reflects his pragmatic recognition that “the traditional religious establishment” carries much influence in many Muslim societies and that it would not serve the Islamists well to come into conflict with it (Qaradawi 1991: 184).D. the fact that it allows many more people than madrasa-trained scholars to be counted as ‘ulama. among other things. What is most striking about the latter statement is. since early 2008. Rashid al-Ghannushi. and Islamic Studies departments at various universities around the Muslim world. in Cairo. “[preserving] the Islamic identity of the Muslim Ummah” and “strengthening the Islamic spirit in the soul of both individuals and groups”. Salman al-‘Awda. “Constitution. is himself a product of al-Azhar.118
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with the fact that Qaradawi. while Qaradawi has enjoyed the patronage of the ruling family of Qatar for many decades. According to its constitution. The five hundred or so people listed as members on the official website of this organization do. 10: 476). The objectives of this organization include. a leading Tunisian Islamist presently based in London. The list includes Muhammad Salim al-‘Awwa. unlike Rida. Rida had once lamented that if only the rich Muslims would establish schools in which the religious and the worldly sciences were taught together. At least in this respect. [and by demonstrating] the validity and applicability of Islam for every time and place” (IUMS. Qaradawi may well be considered the sort of Muslim reformer Rida had visualized. Muslims would no longer be vulnerable to Christian missionary schools and Muslim reformers would be able to promote both the religious and the political interests of Islam (Rida 1953. Rida. .

a Muslim newspaper published from Delhi. and even an Afghan warlord. Such differences suggest that it would not be easy to foster a consensus on substantive issues beyond vague and general pronouncements. Nor is Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. that their intellectual and cultural differences can be bridged. the vice president of the Dar al-‘Ulum of Karachi.7 As this small sample should suggest. a prolific Egyptian Islamist intellectual whose many works include an edition of the collected works of Muhammad ‘Abduh. The Syrian civil engineer Muhammad Shahrur. scholars trained in madrasas of various sorts. There are journalists.6 and Muhammad ‘Ali Taskhiri. Zafar al-Islam Khan. and Islamist leaders here. Jalal al-din Haqqani. as well as in Western or westernized educational institutions. a prominent Islamist journalist in Egypt. who has written extensively on the need to rethink Islamic juridical norms through a radical re-reading of
. Fahmi Huwaydi. Muhammad Husayn Fadl Allah. one of the severest critics of the Iranian religious establishment and of its authoritarian claims. one of leading Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan. lawyers. and doctrinal differences among the people associated with the International Union for Muslim Scholars. editor of the Milli Gazette. the dean of the Shari‘a Faculty of the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow. ‘Ali Muhy al-din Qarradaghi. a specialist in Islamic economics and a close associate of Qaradawi in Qatar. there are significant intellectual. a leader of the Afghan mujahidin during and after the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation who subsequently became part of the Taliban movement and later still emerged as a key figure in the “neoTaliban” insurgency in the tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Muhammad Taqi ‘Uthmani. This can become a very long list. Yet the very differences among members of the ‘Ulama Union makes the rhetorically powerful point that leading scholars and activists from across the Muslim world can come together on a shared platform. an Iranian Shi‘i scholar who has long been associated with efforts to bridge the differences between the Sunnis and the Shi‘a. It is worth noting who is not listed among members of this international alliance.Bridging Traditions
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who came to prominence for voicing opposition to King Fahd’s decision to station Western troops on Saudi soil in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. but suffice it to say here that the dissident Iranian intellectual ‘Abdolkarim Soroush. an Egyptian scholar who had to flee his native Egypt in the face of charges of apostasy for his view on how the Quran ought to be contextualized in its original historical milieu. Shi‘is and Sunnis. Sayyid Salman Nadwi. the most prominent Shi‘i religious authority (marja‘ al-taqlid) in contemporary Lebanon. Muhammad ‘Imara. is not among its members. political.

So. as Qaradawi sees it. varied sorts of individuals can all be recognized as ‘ulama. can be healed or transcended relatively easily. for serving anti-Islamic interests. Qaradawi would probably consider such individuals as representing incommensurable rather than commensurable forms of disagreement—a distinction he has made elsewhere (Zaman 2004: 148). is an idea alien to our Islamic society. others contradict the very premises of a distinct Islamic identity and therefore have no recognizable place within the community. The real divide. Qaradawi writes:
Among the interpretations with which the secularists (al-‘almaniyyun) and the modernists (al-hadathiyyun) calumniate [the Islamists] is the idea of “political Islam. and legal sediments of Western colonialism so that the community can return once again to submission to God’s law in different areas of life. The real divide is. is not between people who are products of different intellectual systems. but rather between different kinds of reform—one genuine. between people committed to the totality and non-negotiability of Islamic norms and those seen as subverting these norms—and the Islamic civilization anchored in them—from within the Muslim community and from outside. because it is anchored in Islam. physically and morally. Such divides. for they have enriched Islamic civilization. social. a prominent Indian scholar who has been a lifelong critic of his fellow ‘ulama for what he sees as their failure to adapt to the needs of changing times and for their excessively politicized interpretations of Islam. is Wahid al-din Khan.120
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the Quran. (Qaradawi 2007: 93)
To look at it another way. as it pleases. and the intellectual disagreements or misunderstandings arising from them. [They also mean by it] actions seeking to cleanse the community of the cultural. too. irrespective of their different intellectual backgrounds. rather. without doubt. By [political Islam] they mean an Islam that concerns itself with the internal and external affairs of the Muslim community. They use this characterization of “political Islam” in order to alienate people from its [aforementioned] content and to frighten them away from those calling to a comprehensive conception of Islam—one that is inclusive of belief and law. worship and social interaction. the other insidious. proselytism and the state.” which. as the membership roster of his ‘Ulama Union makes plain. As the “Islamic Charter” (al-mithaq al-Islami) of the ‘Ulama Union puts it. This means that while some sorts of disagreement are to be cherished. unmistakably echoing Qaradawi on this and other scores:
. Indeed. is also absent. [They mean by it] actions aimed at freeing the community from the foreign power that directs [Muslim] affairs. the real divide is not between those calling for reform and those opposing it.

Globalization itself is a thinly veiled effort to spread Western norms throughout the rest of the world. is internal reform (al-islah al-dhati). Globalization. Qaradawi seems to be in little doubt. More ambitiously. one that begins from the constants of the community and its own interests. Bridging religious and worldly education—or at least some of the distance between their products—is a crucial means of preparing Muslims for such roles. Qaradawi’s world. This is a divide that his “centrism” seeks not to dilute but rather to affirm and strengthen. can be put to use in this effort. Qaradawi argues. Huntington 1996). This signifies the reform of Muslims through Islam. primarily through its means of communication and its information technologies. to create awareness against Western onslaughts against Islam. and not just through political and military means. among others—that civilizations other than the West still exist and that religion plays an important role in many of them (Qaradawi 2000: 112–14. seeks to undermine Islam and Muslim identity. or its “development” in the name of reform. Qaradawi credits the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington with having reminded “defeated” people—by which he presumably means westernizing Muslims. Qaradawi seeks to refurbish not just a commitment to Islamic norms among Muslims but also. Qaradawi seems to envisage an alternate globalization. too. however. (IUMS. and not the distancing of Islam [from the lives of Muslims]. “al-Mithaq”)
Precisely where the boundaries lie between those who use Islam to reform Muslim affairs and those who appeal to reform as a way of undermining Islam itself remains uncertain in the foundation documents of the ‘Ulama Union as well as in Qaradawi’s own writings. that a firm boundary does exist somewhere between the two orientations.
. its distortion. And it is among the purposes of this organization to pool Muslim resources. The external calls for reform really only seek to strike at the community’s strengths in order to keep it weak and to maintain [foreign] control over its affairs. one that preserves the unity of the community and guides it towards excellence and progress. is one in which Islam is pitted against a Western “neoimperialism” (isti‘mar jadid) bent upon the destruction of distinctive Islamic institutions and of Muslim identity (Qaradawi 2000: 9–86). In response to this challenge. The West. Qaradawi believes that it is with Islam and its challenge to the West that Huntington is really concerned (Qaradawi 2000: 115). and specifically. for all of Huntington’s talk of several major civilizations in the contemporary world. as well as that of the ‘Ulama Union. and to think of ways of effectively combating them. a sense of Muslim civilizational identity.Bridging Traditions
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We believe that genuine reform (al-islah al-haqiqi). Yet. one that is not dominated by the neoimperialist West and in which Islam and Muslims can play the leadership role that properly belongs to them.

Following his graduation around 1914. Britain. What is more. and he had initially sought to found an institution that would both equip Muslims with modern.8 Henceforth. The traditional madrasas provided their graduates few avenues toward improving their economic status. that Aligarh’s early leaders found it politic to leave aside its aspirations to becoming the beacon of a new understanding of Islam (Lelyveld 1982). founded in 1867. The former was always a far more important goal for Aligarh than the latter. Zaman 2002). the sort of Islam to which madrasas were committed had little to offer in the face of the modern challenges that confronted Muslims. which became the Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. As well as many staunch defenders. the founder of the aforementioned Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (1875). Deoband has produced its share of scholars who have been highly critical of the sort of learning imparted at this and related institutions. and elsewhere—have come to espouse its reformist orientation. Over the past century and a half or so. Sayyid Ahmad Khan. 1956). producing scholars and religio-political activists who have cast a long shadow over many facets of contemporary Islam (Metcalf 1982. a prolific scholar whose writings include the official biography of one of the founders of Deoband as well as a major history of Islamic education in South Asia. Aligarh would have to content itself with representing one side of the dichotomy of Western versus Islamic education. Deoband has proved to be a remarkably successful institution. One of these critics was Manazir Ahsan Gilani (d. Western forms of knowledge and impart a new understanding of Islam itself. in the aftermath of the formal establishment of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. for in this way alone could they compete with the Hindus for jobs in the colonial economy. Sayyid Ahmad was not only an educational entrepreneur but also a theologian. was convinced that Muslims had no alternative but to learn English and the modern sciences. The other side of this dichotomy came to be typified by the Deoband madrasa. in any case. Gilani had briefly taught at the Deoband madrasa. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Thousands of madrasas—in India. to provide Muslims with an education focusing on the Islamic foundational texts and Islamic law.122
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III
From the Arab world. South Africa. though it was at the Theology Faculty of the Osmania University in
. however. I now turn to South Asia to consider some examples of how traditionally educated scholars there have viewed the dichotomous relationship between rival intellectual traditions. and the extremely low opinion the ‘ulama had of Sayyid Ahmad’s modernist views meant.

other texts and disciplines could be dispensed with to make room for new texts and new sciences. which is precisely what earlier generations of madrasa scholars had done all along. unlike Aligarh. the lingua franca of the Muslims of India. As the ruler of the princely state of Hyderabad and patron of the university had put it in his founding decree of 1917. by ‘Ubayd Allah b. 1196/97). Gilani argues. Mas‘ud al-Mahbubi (d.” (quoted in Datla 2006: 50). added or removed according to the exigencies of the time. Particular texts were included in the curriculum of the madrasa not for their intrinsic “religious” value but rather because they had helped.10 He identifies these as the Mishkat al-masabih. the Hidaya. . to shape and hone the intellectual faculties of the students. together with a commentary on this work. a collection of the reported teachings of the Prophet Muhammad compiled by Muhammad b. By this criterion. this institution was established in order that “the knowledge and culture of ancient and modern times may be blended so harmoniously as to remove the defect created by the present system of education . to argue for Muslim educational reform in his contemporary India. Contrary to general belief both in and outside the madrasa. however. he argues. often treated as a single work called the “Two Jalals”—al-Jalalayn—because the two commentators were both named Jalal al-Din (Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli [d. was extraneous to this core curriculum.9 And a translation bureau was set up to make Western as well as some Islamic works available to students in the Urdu language. a famous compendium of Hanafi law. first published in 1943. 1459] and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti [d. Nizam-i ta‘lim). The medium of instruction at Osmania University. Gilani insisted that there was nothing sacrosanct about much of what is taught in madrasas. was to be Urdu. Yet this small curriculum sufficed. Gilani’s two-volume book on Islamic education. there ought to be no objection to
. Gilani shows that the nucleus of Muslim education in medieval and early modern India had comprised a remarkably small and stable body of religious texts. intellectuals who were highly regarded in their own and later times not just in South Asia but also in the greater Muslim world. by al-Marghinani (d. The experience of teaching at Osmania University undoubtedly shaped Gilani’s own efforts in the direction of “harmoniously blending” rival streams of learning. to produce religious scholars of the highest caliber. 1505]). The implications of this argument are obvious. As long as certain key texts were retained. Everything else. in their time.Bridging Traditions
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Hyderabad (founded in 1918) that he spent much of his academic career. . and two very brief commentaries on the Quran. the Sharh al-wiqaya. ‘Abdallah al-Tabrizi (fl. The real purpose of this book is. 1337). sheds much light on the history of Muslim intellectual life in medieval and early modern South Asia (Gilani. 1346/47).

in that they would have had to consent to the virtual demise of madrasas except as select institutions of specialized higher education. the westernized institutions (he was clearly thinking of Aligarh here. though he did not mention it explicitly) ought to also have the same core curriculum of religious texts (cf. too few to adequately cater to the needs of all Muslims. Once these texts were in place. and sciences that serve the pedagogical and intellectual concerns of the time most effectively. but also the Jamia Millia Islamia of Delhi were classic examples—the Muslim community ought to invest its resources in establishing boardinghouses for Muslims studying in different kinds of educational institutions. As Gilani saw it. But this was only half of Gilani’s proposal. 1: 252–57). This vision of Muslim educational reform expected a great deal of the ‘ulama. The other half concerned not the madrasas but the westernized institutions of learning.
. whereupon he came up with a considerably more modest idea. Nizam-i ta‘lim. In colonial India. Gilani.11 But it also expected a lot from the westernized Muslim colleges and universities. the rest of the westernized. Muslims ought to enroll and study in westernized institutions of all kinds.124
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the continual revaluation and change of the madrasa curriculum in order to make room for new texts. They have seldom done so. this relatively modest proposal could enable Muslims to partake of modern educational opportunities more fully than they had done so far without constantly fearing for their faith (Nadwi 1972: 60–77). in any case. he now suggested. Gilani seems eventually to have realized that his proposals would not convince many people. Irrespective of the nature of education they received. secular curriculum would cease to pose any serious challenges to Muslim religious identity. Just as the madrasas could easily dispense with much of their inherited textual baggage to make way for new texts and disciplines.12 The institution of the madrasa remains unmentioned in this new proposal. techniques. which suggests that Gilani saw the real threat to Muslims as coming from their exposure to Western education rather than from the intellectual schizophrenia of Muslim societies that he had lamented in his history of Muslim education. Muslims would be reasonably secure in their religious identity if their moral formation took place in boardinghouses that self-consciously cultivated their Islamic sensibilities. Rather than spending large amounts of money on establishing new institutions of Western education specifically for Muslims—of which not only Aligarh and the Osmania University in Hyderabad. which would have had to agree to a substantial curriculum in the study of Islam. and there would be no duality of intellectual traditions—no intellectual schizophrenia in Muslim societies. such westernized institutions were.

and now the dean of the Faculty of Shari‘a at the Nadwat al-‘Ulama. ‘Abd al-Bari was a product of the Nadwat al-‘Ulama of Lucknow. a biographer of Gilani and the chief mufti of the Deoband madrasa. economic. he says. Striking a familiar note. Salman Nadwi cites Gilani extensively in this work. This is remarkable because the Tablighi Jama‘at is not an educational venture in any conventional sense but rather a worldwide proselytizing movement which originated in northern India during the first half of the twentieth century with the
. however.13 Zafir al-Din Miftahi. and political matters and there is even less incentive on the part of others to heed their advice in such matters (Nadwi 2004b: 232). Salman Nadwi observes that the Muslim community has suffered greatly because of its division between two very unequal groups: a small group of those representing religious life and a preponderant majority comprising those raised on an “irreligious education” (la-dini ta‘lim). While he now occupies a position of leadership at the Nadwat al-‘Ulama. Salman Nadwi freely acknowledges that his institution has largely failed in its early aspiration to mitigate the divide between secular and religious learning. More remarkable than this candid admission is his observation that it is those belonging to the Tablighi Jama‘at who have come to remedy the longstanding division between rival intellectual streams (Nadwi 2004b: 258–59). though some among the ‘ulama have been rather more receptive to them than have Muslim modernists. Gilani’s aforementioned ideas for a radical restructuring of the madrasa curriculum are. Saudi Arabia. A product both of the Nadwat al-‘Ulama and of the Imam Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud Islamic University in Riyadh. one of its goals was to reduce the distance between traditional and westernized institutions of learning. 1976) strongly endorsed Gilani’s proposal for Muslim boardinghouses as a way of socializing the Muslim youth in Islamic norms while lamenting that neither Gilani nor anyone else had done much to put this idea into effect (Nadwi 1972: 60–77). A more recent example of the continuing interest in aspects of Gilani’s educational thought—in this instance. in a manner truer to the broader thrust of Gilani’s ideas—is offered by a book on the curriculum of the madrasa by Sayyid Salman Nadwi (Nadwi 2004b). likewise applauds Gilani’s proposal (Miftahi 1989: 195–96). A consequence of this division has been an increasingly narrow concern of the religious class (tabaqa) with matters of worship. and the book itself is guided by concerns broadly similar to Gilani’s (Nadwi 2004b: 104–17). ‘Abd al-Bari Nadwi (d. with the result that the ‘ulama have had little to offer by way of sound leadership in social. passed in silence here. which was founded in 1894. In a detailed introduction to a collection of Gilani’s letters.Bridging Traditions
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The precise impact of Gilani’s ideas remains uncertain.

and graduates of these universities have served as preachers on behalf of the Tablighi Jama‘at (Nadwi 2004b: 258). he also sounds a good deal like Qaradawi. who. the Tablighi Jama‘at has influential centers at Aligarh Muslim University as well as at other institutions of modern education. As Salman Nadwi notes. the “intellectual. Yet this movement does not have any serious ideas for solving the religious. civilizational. though focusing primarily on Muslims. enabled the college. . The movement largely consists of those who are not formally trained ‘ulama but rather people with a modern education at various levels.and university-educated Islamists to step into this vacuum in trying to provide what Salman Nadwi sees as a less than desirable leadership to the community (Nadwi 2004b: 259). he says. social. and cultural gulf” (fikri awr tahzibi wa tamadduni khalij) between them has remained unaffected (Nadwi 2004b: 259). economic. as observed earlier. leaders of the Tablighi movement are known for their distrust of any and all scholarly pursuits. play a crucial role in shaping the mentality of the Muslim masses and . . . gulf” (ruhani .’ and so on” (Sikand 2007). Such rhetoric seems to do a better job of expressing the depth of Salman Nadwi’s suspicions of the outside world than it does of improving the madrasa’s image in contemporary India. anchors his efforts
. khalij) between people of different intellectual formations. The result is that while it has been able to reduce the “spiritual . In these instances. America knows that this class of people can effectively mobilize opposition to its imperialistic policies and designs. But the defense of the madrasa itself now takes center stage. Yet such defense has sometimes itself been articulated in strident terms. This is not surprising in view of the extensive unfavorable attention madrasas in India and elsewhere have received from the media and government circles for suspected ties to terrorism. In the aftermath of 9/11. let alone mitigating its perceived incommensurability with rival intellectual streams. and political problems of the people. it has been concerned with the preaching of Islam to non-Muslims as well (Masud 2000). Salman Nadwi has continued to argue for the need to bridge the divide between rival streams of education.’ ‘obscurantists. . [in giving] them a certain direction.’ ‘extremists. and so it is seeking to undermine them. . . In order to legitimize its imperialist aggression against many Muslim countries.126
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goal of reintroducing Muslims to the fundamental norms of their faith. though unlike the madrasa-based Deobandi ‘ulama. it constantly claims that the ulema are ‘terrorists. “The ulema of the madrasas. The Tablighi Jama‘at is largely a product of the Deobandi milieu. As Salman Nadwi put it in a 2007 interview. who are well-versed with the history of the Muslims and of Islam. for its part. This continuing distance has.

however. For instance. The ‘ulama. with Qaradawi and with other Arab religious intellectuals. cannot expand their activities in society unless they broaden their intellectual horizons (Zahid al-Rashidi 2007: 303–305). Abu ‘Ammar Zahid al-Rashidi. because of the failings of state-run educational and other institutions. The reasoning here is also that the best of the earlier ‘ulama have always striven to combat challenges to Islam by appropriating the tools of those posing the challenge in question:
When Greek philosophy had become popular in our society and had begun to affect our belief system. Salman Nadwi has interacted extensively with scholars from the Arab world.iumsonline. he also serves on the board of trustees of this organization (http://www. that the ‘ulama have the opportunity and. Many Muslims. Qaradawi was an honored guest at the Nadwa in Lucknow on several occasions. share a similar analysis. have continued. Again. just as many others reject it.
. the obligation to expand the sphere of their activities in society. if necessary. The reasoning for this is. in the Punjab.shtml). has written extensively in recent years on the need to rethink the curriculum of the madrasa and to integrate the modern sciences into it (Zahid al-Rashidi 2007). as well as his own ties with him. a prominent Deobandi scholar associated with the Nusrat al-‘Ulum madrasa in Gujranwala. indeed. But echoes of Qaradawi’s rhetoric surely also have to do with his own ties with the Nadwat al-‘Ulama. Salman Nadwi’s discourses on the need to live peacefully with other communities—in his case. in fact. These ties. And Salman Nadwi is not only a member of Qaradawi’s ‘Ulama Union. our leading figures like Abu’l-Hasan al-Ash‘ari.net/ English/topic_06b. Themes similar to those of Qaradawi and Salman Nadwi are clearly discernible in the discourses of contemporary Deobandi ‘ulama of Pakistan as well. the former rector of the Nadwa. Like Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi. with the Hindu majority in India—easily shade into assertions of Islam’s superiority over all others and even assertions about the need to defend Islam with the force of arms.Bridging Traditions
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to transcend particular dichotomies afflicting Muslims and Islamic thought in the affirmation of a relentless cultural and political struggle between Islam and the West.14 Such echoes need not surprise us. and also translated many of ‘Ali Nadwi’s writings into Arabic. not only because people seek their guidance but also. Qaradawi is the author of a book celebrating the life and achievements of Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi. and in no small measure. do. in part. rather like Qaradawi. including the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Nadwa in 1975. and it was Salman Nadwi who translated Qaradawi’s speech into Urdu on that occasion (Qaradawi 2001: 24). and not just among Islamists and the ‘ulama.

taken place in bringing the two streams of Islamic and modern learning closer to each other in varied contexts. and its overall framework” (Zahid al-Rashidi 2007: 306). On the other end of the spectrum. religious. and cultural aspects of this conflict. . Yet. its mode of operation. the 1961 reforms of al-Azhar established a number of faculties for the teaching of the modern secular sciences alongside the three existing faculties devoted to Arabic and Islamic studies. proselytism. we should first note that important developments have. This is the case in Egypt. these reforms had built on decades of earlier initiatives in a similar direction. Madrasas in many parts of India have come to be firmly integrated into the educational “mainstream. and sometimes considerably more than that (Metcalf 2007: 96–100.128
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Abu Mansur al-Maturidi.” (Zahid al-Rashidi 2007: 298). that ostensibly resist governmental efforts to regulate them have often opened themselves up to the content of public schools at the elementary levels.16
IV
A key question presents itself in light of the foregoing discussion. reform and intellectual awakening . (Zahid al-Rashidi 2007: 306)
Like Qaradawi. Islamic norms and Muslim identity are being targeted in the name of globalization and human rights. sounding very much like Qaradawi. . . as well as in many other Muslim societies. of learning and research.15 And it is for the ‘ulama “to expound on the intellectual. And they had affirmed the truth and superiority of Islamic beliefs by responding to the objections and doubts created by Greek philosophy and they had done so by employing its own technical vocabulary. and to defend Muslims against this deluge by building fortifications in the form of education. in fact. Zahid al-Rashidi seems to be in little doubt that there is a civilizational conflict between Islam and the West today. and Ibn Taymiyya had come to master Greek philosophy. public schools in many Muslim countries impart substantial Islamic education as part of their curriculum.
.” and even those madrasas. he says. for instance. Ibn Rushd. to confront this aggression with the modern weapons of philosophical and other thought. How do we account for the persistence of the rhetoric about the need to bridge the duality of intellectual traditions in Muslim societies? In addressing this question. in both India and Pakistan. “the teachers and students of madrasas . Ghazali. its weapons. as Gregory Starrett has shown (Starrett 1998). . Though sweeping in their effects. Zaman 2007: 79–82). In Egypt. are unacquainted with the enemy that we are fighting—its nature. he writes.

. including both types of education at the same time” (Nelson 2009: 595). For one thing. for instance. ordinary believers have been taking their own steps toward integrating religious and secular learning. “the overwhelming majority do not approach their educational options (for example. Why. for all their starkly dichotomous juxtapositions. these divides are still real: there is considerable contestation in segments of some Muslim societies not only on how to bring religious and secular forms of knowledge closer together but on whether to do so at all.Bridging Traditions
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Further. Foremost among the many ways in which these neo-Taliban have harassed local populations and challenged government authority is by attacking schools. Though the Taliban regime collapsed not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11. hence immoral. an extreme stance that many even among the Deobandi ‘ulama—the Taliban are broadly identifiable as belonging to the Deobandi orientation—have found objectionable and embarrassing (cf. . most families are inclined to construct a careful balance of sorts. ways of thinking. Zaman 2002: 139–40). Some of the international notoriety the Taliban gained during their short-lived rule in Afghanistan (1996–2001) came. 2001. then. secular learning. they were “not against girls’ education although they opposed the system of women’s education in the country” (Khan 2008a). In contemporary India. Salman Nadwi’s aforementioned observation about the Tablighi Jama‘at serving as a bridge between religious and secular learning likewise points to informal mechanisms whereby ordinary believers have often been able to bring different streams of learning closer together. especially those for girls. Though it is not spelled out here. the grounds on which “the system of women’s education” is opposed have to do with the Taliban’s conflating non-Islamic with anti-Islamic. As one spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban was quoted as saying in July 2008. from their shutting down of girls’ schools. It is surely against the not incorrect perception that at least some segments of the Muslim population—and their religio-political
. religious versus non-religious education) as a zero-sum game. Instead . As Matthew Nelson has argued with reference to attitudes toward Islamic education in contemporary Pakistan. do discourses on the need to bridge the distance between rival streams seem to continue unabated? There are several ways of accounting for this.17 The Taliban and their associates represent an especially egregious instance of opposition to modern. such conflations don’t allow much space for boys’ public schools either. groups of Taliban and those claiming affinity with them reemerged in subsequent years in both southern Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Needless to say.

even as they call for educational reform. that the terms of the debate have been imposed on them by the world they inhabit—and especially by the colonial and postcolonial modernizing elite—and that the ‘ulama now seek only to mitigate its deleterious effects. say. with some exaggeration. Yet it also is an intellectual construct. as we have observed. Almost contemporaneously with Qaradawi’s volume on al-Azhar. political. Zeghal 1999). it is not unusual for such religious scholars to go on to reserve for themselves the prerogative of determining the precise path and pace of reform. between and among Muslims of different sectarian. the noted Pakistani modernist Fazlur Rahman (d. To the extent that they have embraced the dichotomous mode of analysis underlying such discourses. In a work commemorating the millennial celebrations of Egypt’s al-Azhar.130
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leaders—still oppose the integration of religious and secular learning that many ‘ulama have continued to emphasize the need for such integration. and not without some justice. designed to make sense of contested relations among different forms and conceptions of knowledge and among people associated with them. Overlapping explanations such as the foregoing are not without merit. This suggests their concern to not allow the modernizing governing elite to appropriate the ‘ulama’s hesitant openness to reform for their own purposes. after all. among rival schools of thought.
. that there was little intellectual exchange between those studying in the religious and the secular faculties at al-Azhar (Qaradawi 1984: 101–102. among people of varied commitments. and intellectual orientations. all efforts at a genuine integration have so far been largely unfruitful” (Rahman 1982: 130). Nor is thinking in terms of the religious-secular divide an innovation of the ‘ulama. could it perhaps be a means through which the ‘ulama have sought to reorder some of the messiness of social. Qaradawi had noted. The fact that they are so analyzed suggests that framing the issues in this way helps dislodge from center stage a number of other conflicts. that “despite a widespread and sometimes deep consciousness of the dichotomy of education. Yet. and intellectual conflicts they find around themselves? This new dichotomy is not imaginary. Contestations over particular conceptions of knowledge do not necessarily have to be analyzed. Many among them would assert. cf. religious. finally. but it also reinforces the dichotomy of religious and secular learning in the very act of transcending it. of initiatives toward integrating the religious and the secular streams has often left many unconvinced on both sides. 1988) lamented. The efficacy. but it is tempting to account for the sheer persistence of discourses on bridging religious and secular learning in another way too. in terms of this (or any other) dichotomy. for instance.

for instance. more streamlined Islamic identity—one anchored in the aspiration to combine religious and worldly forms of knowledge and to unite contemporary Muslims on this aspiration. conflicts. To Qaradawi. lie just beneath the surface of such bland dichotomies. Sinners and upright people. Bridging or collapsing the divide between the religious and the secular is. as we have observed. then. in fact. with the major remaining question being how to seamlessly combine it with modern forms of knowledge. as a way to at least rhetorically do away with some of these earlier conflicts in the interest of a simpler. Yet one hardly needs to probe very deeply to see that a great deal of contestation on conceptions of politics. The umma ceased to be a caravan taking everyone by the same route to the same destination. In their different contexts. As Patricia Crone has observed:
[With the gradual emergence of Sunni Islam] mainstream Muslims came fully to accept that the umma had to consist of a wide variety of different and even antagonistic groups pursuing diverse aims and objectives under the same general Islamic umbrella. As Matthew Nelson has argued in the aforementioned study. and that Muslims ought to transcend or ignore particularistic sectarian and other commitments to be united in devotion to this Islam. adherents of one legal school and the other. a means to the emergence of a new religio-political elite. shared entity (Nelson 2009). To Zahid al-Rashidi. Much the same might be said of Muslims in many other societies. people moving in quite different directions under intellectual imams of their own: all these and more came to form a single community eventually known as Sunni. (Crone 2004: 389–90)
The new conflict between religious and secular learning might be seen. resonates widely among vast sectors of society in Pakistan. The discourse on how to bridge the gap between secular and religious learning tends to posit Islam as itself a homogeneous. true. for Rida and others. Even as questions of educational reform are clearly intertwined with politics. overarching conception of Muslim politics in which questions of religious education are anchored. In contemporary
.Bridging Traditions
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Historically the Sunni tradition had learned to live with these messy. there isn’t any shared. and the place of Muslims in the world does. Rida and Qaradawi envisage an Islamic religio-political order. the idea that there is a single. believers and sinful Muslims. as to Qaradawi. and often interminable. it is also a crucial way of strengthening Muslim defenses in the new civilizational conflict between Islam and the West. Islam. it is a necessary step toward invigorating a global Muslim consciousness—an alternate globalization—in the face of what he sees as the Western neoimperialist threat. Islam.

1979) of Pakistan. secular disciplines—just as Muslims had done at earlier times according to the imperatives of those times. is. but rather on a sense of belonging to India and of claiming Muslim cultural and political rights on that basis (cf. 118–29). As Ahmad Dallal observes. too. 1933). Islamic education was a crucial means of preserving Muslim identity. 112–13. unlike Rida and Qaradawi. yet. Nadwi 2004a: 61–62). a jurisdiction that covered ‘all aspects of life’ [had] . . Even so. of course. speaks in Manichaean terms about Islam in relation to much of the rest of the world. Salman Nadwi’s calls for Muslim political mobilization are premised not on pan-Islam or on aspirations to establish an Islamic state. . to all facets of life. Ihata. that Muslims ought to take the Quran as the starting point of all knowledge. just as a building will not have a secure foundation if its stones are all of different shapes and sizes.132
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India. There is a partial analogue to Gilani’s minimalist conception of Islamic education in his view that the Quran should not be thought to contain everything. seemed more appropriate to Rida than a legal code that did not purport to exhaust all aspects of this life” (Dallal 2000: 356–57). Like the modern nation-state. This expressed the conviction of such ‘ulama that Islam did not depend on political authority in order to thrive. Manazir Ahsan Gilani was among countless other ‘ulama who decided not to emigrate from India to Pakistan at the time of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. so too will the Muslim community not succeed if its members are at odds with one another in their intellectual formation (Rida 1912c: 573). through analogical reasoning. has vivid memories of Muslim political grandeur. Salman Nadwi. including the natural sciences (Mawdudi 1972: 66–100. that efforts to find all knowledge and justifications for all human endeavors—from modern science to politics—in the Quran are misguided (Gilani. As he put it in a speech at Aligarh’s Anglo-Oriental College in 1912. this education could be integrated with modern. a celebrated scholar with whom Gilani had studied at Deoband. 93). “In an age of the ever increasing powers of the nation state. including Sayyid Abu’l-A‘la Mawdudi (d. In an earlier generation. This perspective is in marked tension with the view of many Islamists. which he credited to Anwarshah Kashmiri (d.18 Gilani’s view also stands in sharp contrast with Rashid Rida’s conviction that the teachings of the Islamic foundational texts can be shown to be extendable. a conclusion their forebears had already reached upon the establishment of British colonial rule in India. as Gilani saw it. Rida seems to be officiating here at a rather peculiar marriage of
. The implication of this point. Rida also wanted the system of education to produce people with a shared culture. and he. too.

. and what vision of politics—and of the world—ought to guide educational reform. And much suspicion continues to characterize the relations between those who are products of Islamic institutions of learning and those graduating from westernized colleges and universities. not a few among the traditionally educated religious scholars continue—alongside many others—to be important contributors to the shaping of this arena. of modernists and the ‘ulama. just how intractable the problem is and how elusive the prospects for any convincing solutions to it. are all constitutive of an evolving arena of debate and contestation which. Even when the principle that secular and religious forms of knowledge ought to be brought together into a shared system of education is acknowledged. the sort of homogeneity modern nation-states seek to foster (Gellner 1983. Gilani. The fact that many religious intellectuals have long continued to lament the incommensurability of intellectual traditions in their societies suggests. of facets of the scholarly tradition—that this effort would seem to require. extend well beyond any dichotomous constructions. however. or the tension between a growing agreement to transcend this dichotomy and the lack of substantial agreement on how to do so. there clearly is a broad and growing agreement within the ranks of the leading ‘ulama as well as between the ‘ulama and other religious intellectuals that bridging the gulf between different intellectual traditions is desirable and. A rather different way of looking at the problem is also worth considering. Among the tensions we are left with in the end is the following. cf. and politics in their interrelationship. on the one hand. At issue are competing understandings of what sort of education the Muslim youth ought to acquire. had a considerably less homogeneous outcome in mind when proposing his minimalist combination of modern and Islamic learning. the practical application of that principle remains a matter of suspicion. there is no unanimity on what precisely is the gulf that most needs to be bridged and why the effort to do so is worth making. and uncertainties about the sort of criticism—of a “neoimperialist” West. and. indeed. education. a matter of great urgency. Bowen 2007). on the other. can itself be viewed as a fertile ground for new ways of thinking about Islam. the perceived dichotomy between religious and secular learning.Bridging Traditions
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the supposedly shared convictions of the pious forebears. implications. On the other hand. for his part. On the one hand. In South Asia and the Middle East. Anxieties about how to bridge rival traditions. how the interests of Islam are best promoted. in their scope. of course. and possibilities. We can see this tension in more than one way. From this vantage.

” See Rahmani (1972: 357) (letter from Gilani to Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi. as occupying a distinct sphere in society. 1944). On the problems this madrasa had faced from its inception. Rida (1906) is a work comprised of fictional dialogues between a traditionalist scholar given to “blind imitation” of his forebears and a forward-looking “reformer. I am concerned with a different problem. he said.” The latter is clearly meant to represent Rida’s own position. For the characterization of taqlid as blind imitation. the question of how and why the traditionally educated religious scholars have sought to undo or mitigate the effects of such divisions. In the present work. See note 1.. Whoever reads his [books] . 2008.net/articls/info/members. . He had not known. viz. however. for instance. they didn’t even read the writings of those on their own side. 11. 7. 9.
. 4. See Datla (2006: 196). The language of instruction was changed from Urdu to English in 1951. I have explored some of the processes through which traditionally educated Muslim scholars of colonial India came to make sharp distinctions between “religious” and “secular” learning and to conceive of their institutions of learning. ibid. Elsewhere. For the full list. on Sayyid Ahmad’s theological views. Gilani once complained that though he had written this book in defense of the ‘ulama’s system of education. This summary of his views derives from Rida (1906) as well as his diatribes against the ‘ulama throughout his Quran commentary (Rida 1953).d. they had generally ignored it. above. 8. predicated on a firm distinction between the religious and the secular. 2. see http://iumsonline. though he uses it primarily for the Afghan rather than the Pakistani Taliban who have been active since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. see Rida (1912a). 10. see Troll (1978). a distinction that owes much to British colonial categories of analysis.134
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Notes
1. It is hard to believe. see Lelyveld (1978). . that many ‘ulama would have seen Gilani as being “on their own side” in this instance. however.” 6. See Zaman (1999) and Zaman (2002: 60–86). Gilani’s attempt to bridge the distance between religious and secular learning is.shtml (accessed April 16. and I take it as such. 3. The boundaries between the neo-Taliban on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier are as porous as the border itself. For the early history of the college. 5. not long after the merger of the princely state of Hyderabad into the postcolonial Indian union. Gilani (N. 64. Rida (1906: 8) (of the preface. the madrasas. [b]) is referred to in the text as Nizam-i ta‘lim. see. The characterization “neo-Taliban” comes from Giustozzi (2008). as of September 2009 the site has been unavailable). will know that this man’s thought is the lighthouse providing guidance for the journey of Islam in this contemporary age. paradoxically. paginated separately).. See Qaradawi (1991: 100): “The Imam Rashid Rida was the renewer of Islam in his age. dated November 10. “that it is not just the books of their opponents that [the ‘ulama] didn’t read.

14. These are not “Islamic schools” in any conventional sense but rather westernized educational institutions. 389–414.net/articls/info/members. there is no place after it for any other sacred or secular law (shari‘at wa qanun). Purity and the Vanguard: Educational Ideology of the Jama‘at-i Islami of India. 27 in the organization’s list of members. We should not despair. Salman Nadwi (2004a: 63): “Our religion has come [to the world] in order to remain forever. In the troubled Swat region of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. “Power. 18. the ongoing battle for cultural supremacy between the West and Muslims” (Zahid al-Rashidi 2007: 239).” see ibid. and elsewhere by those associated with the Turkish reformer Fethullah Gülen. 1941. It is in the dormitories managed by the school that an Islamic moral formation takes place. Manazir Ahsan (N. Central Asia.Bridging Traditions
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12. 15.d. Though he does not cite Qaradawi here.” In Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?. Our sacred law (shari‘at) is the last of such laws. one December 2008 estimate put the number of girls’ schools destroyed by the neo-Taliban and allied groups at eighty and of boys’ schools at forty-five (Khan 2008b). God will [again] exalt the Muslim community” (from a speech delivered at a girls’ madrasa in 2004).
. 16. as of September 2009 the site has been unavailable). 13. “Muslim Culture and Religious Thought. For a discussion of this speech as well as some of Mawdudi’s other ideas on education. A.
Works Cited
Ahmad. 98). . L. Pakistan. It is our law that will triumph. Yusuf. See Turam (2007: 71–76. One instance of Zahid al-Rashidi’s own efforts in this regard is his regular exposition of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights for the benefit of his advanced madrasa students. . Ali. “the benefit [of this exercise] is that it becomes easy for young ‘ulama to understand today’s global struggle between civilizations. It is worth remarking here that Gilani’s latter proposal shares an important affinity with the network of schools established in recent decades in Turkey. As he sees it. it is worth noting that Zahid al-Rashidi is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars founded by Qaradawi. 2008. Irfan. London: Oxford University Press. and living in such dormitories is usually mandatory for the students. 2008. S. S. ed. See iumsonline. teaching English and the modern sciences. On the assertion that Islam does not limit itself to “defensive warfare. London: Routledge. Jamal Malik. ‘Abd al-Bari later taught at the aforementioned Osmania University as a professor of philosophy. . It is our religion that will triumph. 142–64. Zahid al-Rashidi’s name is listed at no. 22–23 (from a speech at the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in 1997). Here he seeks to place the declaration in its intellectual and historical context and to systematically compare it with particular Islamic norms. see Ahmad (2008: 142–64). Cf.shtml (accessed April 16. [a]) is referred to in the text as Ihata. ed. 17.. Europe. O’Malley. Gilani. no other religion will remain forever.” In Modern India and the West: A Study of the Interaction of Their Civilizations.

: Princeton University Press.” In Public Islam and the Common Good. Zeghal. Zaman. Princeton. N. ed. Gujranwala: AlShari‘a Academy.: Princeton University Press. Berna. 1999. 2007. Princeton.” In Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education. “Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia. Robert W.138
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Troll. Zahid al-Rashidi. 2002. Radical Islam. ———. Calif. Malika.: Stanford University Press.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31: 371–99.J. N. Christian W. and the State (1952–94). Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology. ———.J. 61–86. “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar. Eickelman. Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement. 1999. 129–55. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman. ———. Armando Salvatore and Dale F. ed. 1978. Delhi: Vikas. 2004. Stanford. Muhammad Qasim.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41: 294–323. “The Ulama of Contemporary Islam and Their Conceptions of the Common Good. The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change. “Religious Education and the Rhetoric of Reform: The Madrasa in British India and Pakistan. Dini madaris ka nisab wa nizam. Turam. 2007. Abu ‘Ammar. 2007. Leiden: Brill.
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Part Three Violence and Conversion in Europe
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the victim of police violence.6
The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in France and North Africa
Paul A. her studies in Kantian philosophy. the film relates a very different coming-of-age story—not of young men trying to survive in the shadow of police violence. his fantasy of killing a police officer if their mutual friend Abdel. Saïd: You neither? You don’t want to be the next Arab killed in a police station? Vinz: Exactly. If Kassovitz’s film self-consciously presents a fable of class and spatial solidarity emblematized by Vinz’s self-presentation as an “Arab. . Djamel. . and her growing sexual desire for a Muslim man.
Vinz: You want to be the next Arab (rebeu) killed in a police station? Saïd: No. La Haine—a bleak. neorealist portrayal of marginalization and violence in the Parisian outer-city (banlieue) housing projects (les cités)—the white Jewish protagonist Vinz attempts to justify to his close North African Muslim buddy.
Ten years later. .” Albou’s film—set in the midst of and portraying a series of attacks on Jewish synagogues and persons 141
. Silverstein
In a particularly poignant moment in Matthieu Kassovitz’s celebrated 1995 film. Set in another Parisian peripheral cité. a refugee from Algeria’s protracted civil war. Laura. Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem explored the fractures of such cross-ethnic and cross-religious imagination. Saïd. Vinz: Well. but of a young Orthodox Jewish woman. me neither. trying to navigate the “religious law” of her community. dies.

these authors posit Muslim-French anti-Semitism as a continuation of an older Muslim anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism imported from North Africa by immigrants. young Muslim-French men from the cités are demonized as culturally violent. Pierre-André Taguieff (2004). and the local characterization of Islam as a religion of social protest (Daynes 1999. homophobic. at the very same moment that their modes of dress. If the recently expanded rates of conversion to Islam in the cités and prisons of France1 index the tentative growth of an Islamic chic. While careful to distinguish Islamism from Islam. 2005) in attributing to Muslim
. Alain Finkielkraut (2003). and let fester by a state fearful of offending its minority populations and Arab diplomatic partners (Brenner 2002: 14. sexist. as “lost territories of the Republic” (Brenner 2002). Lakhdar et al. 2003) has discussed in the United States and Latin America—this putative “Islamization” of the banlieues has invoked alarmist concerns over the rise in Islamic fundamentalism and the increased representation of the cités as spaces of “jihad” (Pujadas and Salam 1995). in contemporary French media and political discourse. and anti-Semitic (Guénif-Soulaimas and Macé 2003). musical forms. with the failure of Laura and Djamel’s relationship and the emigration of Laura’s family to Israel. and Shmuel Trigano (2003)—have linked the “new anti-Semitism” to the progressive turn to Islamic identity politics by the children of North African immigrants (or Franco-Maghrebis). and speech patterns are appropriated as styles of resistance by nonMuslim youth across the banlieues and even within bourgeois city centers. transmitted from parent to child. Raphaël Draï (2001). These authors follow Bat Ye’or (2002. 2007)—much as Hisham Aïdi (2002.142
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that marked France during the early 2000s—presents the ultimate impossibility of such cross-ethnic and cross-religious imagination. The dynamics of Islamophobia and Islamophilia in France must be understood in the context of the recent debate over the “new anti-Semitism” in France. Much as has occurred for African American men in the United States. Taguieff 2004: 14–15). What this volume terms “Islamophobia” and “Islamophilia” can perhaps best be broached by exploring how categories of ethno-religious difference are produced in and through a history of violence.2 For Trigano (2003: 91). and as the forward outposts of an Islamic imperial “Eurabia” (Bat Ye’or 2005). this assessment leads to a wholesale condemnation of “Arabo-Muslim” society as in need of complete reform if it is to fit into a secular modern world (see Draï 2001: 191). many recent commentators—including Emmanuel Brenner (2002). Contrasting the reported rise of anti-Semitic attacks in France during the early 2000s to the “classical anti-Semitism” whose ties to rightist expressions of French nationalism have been carefully detailed by Zeev Sternhell (1986).

Beriss 1990. they see this renewed Ottoman form of governance as already in effect in the banlieues. the younger generation—acting as “Muslims” and largely disavowing the ethnonym “Beur”—rather orients their political consciousness to the occupation of Iraq or the violence in Israel/Palestine as salient analogies for their own condition in France. Silverstein 2004a). and the ongoing experience of racism and marginalization of many Muslim-French citizens indicates that the Manichaean world described by Frantz Fanon (1963: 41–42) in late colonial Algeria remains a fair descriptor of the present reality. It is in this context that
. and the resulting increase in confrontations between police and cité youth. this “war on terror” has largely resulted in the interpellation (in the Althusserian sense of the term) of Franco-Maghrebis as “Muslims. when fears of the Algerian civil war’s spread to French soil led to the state’s progressive securitization of the housing projects (or cités) where many of the young Franco-Maghrebis in question live. and approach the violence of anti-Semitism. with roots in the early-1990s. where political norms of democracy and state secularism (laïcité) simply do not exist. Moreover. from the bitter war of decolonization that literally tore the French Republic asunder.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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Europeans a political will to re-establish a transnational caliphate in which minorities like Jews would be treated as dhimmis. subject to the whims of the sovereign—what Trigano (2003: 106–18) calls “the Ottomanization of Europe. within a set of unresolved and enduring struggles over French national belonging that derive from the colonization of North Africa and. The emigration of North African workers and their families transported memories of violence to France.” Indeed. In contrast. Killian 2003. Islamophobia. This marginalization has been exacerbated in recent years by France’s “war on terror.” a war that antedates September 11.3 These tensions are embedded within French postcoloniality. which Finkielkraut (2003: 10) has characterized as “savage lands” (lieux féroces). Auslander 2000. Hargreaves 1995). Bowen 2006. and Islamophilia together as part of a set of structural tensions within late French modernity—tensions between particularism and universalism. more particularly. I conceptualize Muslims and Jews in France within the same analytic field. Scott 2007. Whereas the previous generation of Franco-Maghrebi social and political actors—that of the Beur movement of the 1980s—primarily limited their activism toward improving their daily lives as citizens of France and residents of dilapidated suburban localities. Moruzzi 1994. between individual and collective rights.” a hailing that has been abetted by the larger public drama around the hijab and its recent banning from public schools (see Asad 2006. and looked to the struggles of black Americans and South Africans for their political inspiration (see Derderian 2004.

have been similarly racialized as “immigrants” (see Silverstein 2005)
. provided the framework through which various groups have made distinct claims to French subjecthood (Bahloul 1996. colonial governance. and legally suspect Muslim-French citizens against the French state. and as French. Like Wieviorka (2007: 13).” and the violence they confront from the French state. Benbassa 1999: 185–89. In France. the “Arabs” are therefore thought to be doubly mistreated by the French Jews who repress them as Jews. and even Islamophobic platforms. Hyman 1998: 193–214). pro-Israel. identify with persecuted Jews. as I will discuss below. indeed.144
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their own reaction to the French state as an ongoing colonizing force can take on the form of generalized anti-Zionism and occasional anti-Semitism. I reject any definition of these phenomena as “homogeneous or coherent. multiply surveilled.” Moreover.
The violent racialization of North African immigrants and their children as “Muslims. As Michel Wieviorka (2007: 142–43) and his colleagues have argued:
The Jews in Israel behave towards the Palestinians as the “French” in France do towards the “North Africans. while North African Jews and Muslims.4 The January–February 2006 abduction and murder of French-Jewish cellular phone salesman Ilan Halimi provides one site to examine how this violence of identification and disidentification plays out on the ground in highly ambiguous and complex fashion. In the atmosphere of racism and disaffiliation which characterises them. Jewish-Muslim sectarian conflict. I am not claiming that historical relations between Jews and Muslims in North Africa are completely irrelevant. racist and disrespectful towards them. particularly of the first generation. I am engaging only a particular dimension of the diverse and fragmented character of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in France. . I am explicitly sidelining a mode of explanation that treats reciprocal violence and fantasy as but a continuation of long-standing. is sometimes responded to in violence directed back at the state and those (including Jews) who seem to represent it. and adopt philo-Semitic. Muslim populations in France and North Africa—particularly Berber/ Amazigh activists—engage in contrasting practices of cultural imagination. In reading contemporary dynamics of Islamophobia/Islamophilia and anti-Semitism/philo-Semitism as part of a larger conflict that pits young.” . with Jews being ironically held up (via a misleading alliance with Israeli soldiers) as icons of French bourgeois success and Islamophobic practice. . reproducing the model of the Israeli Jew towards the Palestinian Arab. socioeconomically marginalized. In other cases.

Guilhaume 1992. and in the formation of the Indigènes de la République movement only primarily engaging an elite or educated or activist fringe of Muslim housing project youth. The ongoing violence in Israel/Palestine. Rosenblum 1988. Cooper and Stoler 1997. or to view the nominally anti-imperial struggles of yesterday and today as in any way seamless. insofar as the colonial and wartime Algerian contexts exist as key moments in the identification of North African Muslim and Jews as differential.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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and found themselves inhabiting similar spaces and sharing urban services and resources (such as halal/kosher butcher shops). For this reason. referencing Michel Foucault (1997). has termed a “war between the races.5 However. but also Bullard 2000). the French colonial administration formally distinguished European citizens from native subjects (termed
. and even framing their response in kind.” for the recognition of France’s responsibility in the slave trade. Lucas and Vatin 1975. their differential memories of colonial and wartime Algeria guaranteed their affective distance (see Stora 1991). a “civilizing mission” as much as a military expedition (see Colonna 1975.” In colonial North Africa. categorical subjects. These relations were periodically exacerbated following the 1967 war in Israel/Palestine. Nonetheless. they remain an important analytical starting point. magnifying the vigilance of North African Jews toward anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence.
Colonial Roots of Islamophobia
The French colonization of North Africa was understood by many of its ideologues as part of a larger duty. has driven a further wedge between the populations. with mobilizations since 2003 against the proposed law to require the teaching of the “positive role of colonialism. this particular genealogy of modern sectarianism is far less important for younger Franco-Maghrebis. Their historical consciousness of colonial violence in Algeria has remained for the most part limited (Stora 2006). born and raised in France after the Algerian war of independence. it played itself out much closer to what JeanLoup Amselle (2003: x). and the more general self-presentation (in the wake of the Algerian civil war and the French war on terror) of many North African Arabs and Berbers as first and foremost Muslims. While this contested and highly ambivalent mission was premised on a revolutionary political theory of universal citizenship. it would be wrong to understand youth fantasy and violence as the mere continuation of their parents’ sectarianism. particularly given the Algerian Jewish community’s orientation toward Israel as a primary source of political identification (Hyman 1998: 202–205).

on the other hand.” “hostile” nature.146
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“nationals”). Lorcin 1995. suspicion. Silverstein 2004b: 35–75). In colonial discourse. their “inveterate laziness. treating them as differentially assimilable into a project of civilization (Ageron 1960. military scholars—following the lead of earlier arguments proposed by such luminaries as Alexis de Tocqueville (1991 [1937–1847])—repeatedly reified Arab society as principally and primarily Islamic.” In the first place. dishonesty. French colonial ethnologists further classified the indigenous populations according to cultural and linguistic traits. and perceived an incompatibility of Islamic civilization with French (Christian-secular) modernity. decrying the Muslim Arab as a professional “sun-
. legally inscribing this division in a code de l’indigénat that. Islam served as the main explanatory factor for the horrors of war (beheadings. . denied natives French citizenship and made them subject to different court systems and legal codes as standardized and officialized by the French administration. a duty of eternal war which cannot be suspended” (Servier 1923: 345–46). scholars focused on a contradictory aspect of Islam— “fatalism. and. tortures. They viewed it as the root cause of a long series of vices: “laziness.” the absolute reliance on Allah to determine one’s future. unpredictability. horrors attributable to the “vindictive and cruel character” of Arabs “who know no other law than that of the strongest” (Hamelin 1833: 7). access to French citizenship required the renouncing of one’s religious “personal” or “local civil” status. Islam served as the prime trope for explaining two opposed characteristics of a supposed Arab personality: on the one hand. within this larger. their “bellicose. luxury and feasting . a fear that was re-energized during the twentieth century by Arab nationalist movements in Tunisia and Egypt that would eventually give birth to the fight for Algerian independence. attributable to their religious “fanaticism”. which was understood as tantamount to apostasy and thus almost universally avoided. until 1870 for Jews and 1958 for Muslims in Algeria. . In the second place. dissimulation. In North Africa. racialized citizen/“national” divide. In general. Rinn 1884). which wielded mystical authority and were capable of organizing believers into potential violence (cf. like the marabouts and Sufi brotherhoods (khouan). French observers argued that the Arabs’ “absolutism” placed them in a “permanent state of war with the infidel.” (Van Vollenhoven 1903: 169). love of voluptuousness. Studies conducted by military ethnographers paid particular attention to those Algerian religious organizations.” resulting from their reverent “fatalism. Such a concern belied fears of Islam as a unifying political force during nineteenth-century anti-colonial revolts. Yet. mutilations) witnessed by the French expeditionary forces during their conquest of Algeria. de Neveu 1846.

One senator. According to what later became known as the “Kabyle myth” (Ageron 1960). military scholars argued that Berbers. opposed the reform on the grounds that it would implicitly condone “Coranic” civil and familial practices. In contrast to their categorization of Arab Muslims as “unassimilable. providing needed soldiers and factory workers during
. French administrators perceived this essential religiosity of Arabs as an inherent stumbling block to their administrative or legal assimilation into the French nation. Such an assumption led to the effective suspension of laïcité in Algeria. not to mention French morality” (cited in Borgé and Viasnoff 1995: 18).” French colonial scholars treated certain minority populations—particularly Jews and Berbers—as more proximate to French civilization in large part because of the perceived lack of centrality of religion to these populations’ cultural practices and social life. In similar fashion Berbers—while not enfranchised—were repeatedly singled out for assimilation efforts (including the establishment of French public and missionary schools [Colonna 1975]).The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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drinker” (buveur de soleil) (Docteur X 1891: 55). Moreover. and hence should normally have been subject to the same legal and constitutional regime as the metropole. and “Puritan” in their work habits. While North African Jews were originally denied French citizenship alongside Muslims. addressing the Senate on June 27. the incorporation of colonial nationals into the Greater French body politic was hailed as salutary for the French nation. When in 1891 the Third Republic considered eliminating this last impediment and naturalizing all Algerians. M. a violent debate broke out within the Parliament. were allowed to operate according to a system of customary rather than Islamic law for civil matters. The consideration of religion in the granting of citizenship was only eliminated after World War II. religion and law are too intimately confused for the juridical condition of Muslims to be identical to that of Frenchmen or Europeans” (Larcher 1903: 16). Indeed.” which “escape French laws. as alleviating a stagnant metropolitan birthrate. in spite of the fact that the colony was officially three départements d’outre-mer. mines. and were preferred in the recruitment for migrant labor to colonial farms. from “feudal” land tenure to “polygamy. Sabatier. on the eve of Algerian independence. and abroad to France. as the autochthones of North Africa. were only superficially Islamized. 1891. “In the Mahometian civilization. at various moments. impeding all social progress toward modernity. secular by nature. This reverent “laziness” was understood to reciprocally weaken the Muslim’s intellect. they were later enfranchised in Algeria by the 1870 Crémieux decree and were subsequently treated as distinct from the larger colonized population.

hundreds were killed and their dead bodies tossed into the Seine (Einaudi 2001.148
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successive European conflicts. the interests of the two populations largely diverged in the course of the decolonization struggles. as the violence in Algeria escalated. As French citizens. Sahli 1953. while the Arab leaders of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria and the Istiqlal Party in Morocco sought to establish Arabo-Islamic nations (Duclos 1972. These divisions between Arabs. and were almost universally “repatriated” (to use the French state’s rhetoric) to France at the end of the 1954–62 Algerian war.
. The wars fought in Morocco and Algeria had repercussions in France. the criminalization of their associations and organizations. when riot police opened fire on Algerian marchers. While Arabs and Berbers fought together against the French. a former high official under the Vichy regime who was later found responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to concentration and death camps in Nazi Germany. assassinated. with many Algerian Berber leaders exiled. either in workers’ dormitories or. for being colonial “toadies” in insisting on the cultural diversity of North Africa (Lacheraf 1953. where several hundred thousand North African men (many of whom were Berber) worked and lived. The police were under the direct control of Maurice Papon. and helping to “re-barbarize” Frenchmen out of their debilitating decadence. 1961. During the war. The Istiqlal and FLN’s visions later achieved hegemony. such as occurred at a pro-FLN rally in Paris on October 17. with Berber elites calling for a multiethnic and multiconfessional independent state. or marginalized for their supposed fissiparous tendencies. and occasional instances of police repression. and Jews played themselves out during the struggles over decolonization. Jews—although many were sympathetic to Algerian and Moroccan nationalists—by and large sought to maintain some form of French North Africa. see Chaker 1990). and who subsequently proved his mettle by instituting a regime of state-condoned torture against members of the nascent Algerian nationalist movement when he was governor of Constantine in eastern Algeria. these immigrants were subject to heavy surveillance. Stora 1991). Haroun 1986). In this sense. state violence against Jews and Muslims is historically and intimately connected. Berbers. in shantytowns with their wives and children.6 Such claims of Berber consonance with and contribution to French modernity have been reiterated in the tensions between Islamophilia and Berberophilia in the contemporary period. as today’s Berber/ Amazigh activists present themselves and the Berberophone populations they speak for as the avatars of indigenous laïcité and the models of Islamic practice compatible with and supportive of French Republican values.

and particularly Muslim nationalists. whether as a “peaceful invasion” (invasion pacifique) or one armed with Kalashnikovs (Raspail 1973. in a style of assault known locally as a ratonnade (“rat hunt”).000 North Africans living in France. in particularly ritualized fashion. as French history textbooks proclaim. Such racist (or Islamophobic) discourse and martial representations have been formalized in actual attacks which.” the French equivalent of “good ol’ boys”) would set upon the “rat” (raton). In sportlike fashion (resembling. there were over 400. with tropes of “invasion” being deployed to describe the North African presence particularly during moments of economic downturn. whose generalized anti-Semitism extended to both Jews and Muslims. were subjected alongside Jews to internment and deportation. both in the metropole and in the North African territories. If Charles Martel.8 Emerging from this colonial history. beat him up. By the early 1980s. have sought to repel the immigrant armies. intermittent “murderous summers” (étés meurtriers) claimed the lives of nearly fifty North African immigrant men and their children between 1973 and 1983 (Aïchoune 1985). fifty Algerian workers were attacked and fifteen were killed in and around Marseilles.7 This immigration was ambivalently portrayed by French observers in alternate terms of national contribution and violence. During the Vichy government. In the summer of 1973 alone.5 million. Indeed. principally directed at breaking down the nationalist movement. the mid-1970s. particularly around Charles Maurras’ Action Française movement. The French-Algerian war witnessed an upsurge of popular and police violence against immigrants. but often indiscriminately affecting North African men and women in general. extreme right scholars repeatedly warn that the “Islamic subversion [may] win the new Hundred Years’ War and deliver us to Islam” (Hollender 1988). Muslims. perhaps. or “brothers-in-law. destroy his identity papers or
. the aristocratic tradition of the fox hunt). pushed back the Saracens in the battle of Poitiers in ad 732. Figueras 1983).The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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Postcolonial Violence
By war’s end. and family reunification policies afterward facilitated the arrival of the wives and children of male immigrants. a group of white beaufs (short for beaux-frères. These attacks trace their genealogy to the nationalist and fascist activism of the 1920s and 1930s. this number had increased to approximately 1. as labor migration continued apace until 1974. immigration from North Africa today has been reconstrued by certain apocalyptic writers as the Saracens’ revenge. and since the mid-1990s (Wihtol de Wenden 1991). as occurred in the 1930s.

This enactment of beauf. However. in Germany.150
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pay slips (thus making his stay in France illegitimate). compartmentalized spaces of the French state within the housing projects. the children were shot at. Moreover. the perpetrators often succeeded in pleading guilty to lesser sentences. nationalism. Masculinized pleasure appears to be a central component of racist violence in France. Alongside the . “novel subject positions [that] are constructed and construed by violent performances” in postcolonial France. to borrow the words of Allen Feldman (1991: 20). primarily employed for hunting purposes (Aïchoune 1985: 141–43). the attacks participate in a larger symbolic history and structure. the attack ritual had transformed somewhat. young Franco-Maghrebi men and women began in the early 1980s to mobilize col-
. “legitimate” violence. it is not only the beauf male subject that is elaborated through violence. As in the case of the . and leave him for dead. as Terence Turner (1995) has argued. Franco-Maghrebi male subjectivity is likewise engendered in the course of these same racist attacks. It is important to note the articulation of racism. as mediated in the confrontation with the French state and its agents. While the intentions of individual attackers are largely inscrutable. The attackers included male private guards and security forces assigned to local supermarkets and train stations. if not in being acquitted altogether (Aïchoune 1985). However. Rather than being hunted down by packs.22 long rifles. male nationalist agency through violence.22 long rifle attackers. by the early 1980s. by (mostly elderly. sniper-style. with the principal prey changing from male immigrant workers to “immigrant” children (irrespective of their actual place of birth) playing in the courtyards between public housing buildings. the attacks described above seem to constitute exclusivist enactments of the French nation (Stolcke 1995). racist attacks are as much acts of inclusion as of exclusion. Indeed. Marginalized (often unemployed) “white Frenchmen” act violently as if to re-insert themselves socially as the ideological defenders of the racially circumscribed “nation” on whose behalf they appear (and sometimes claim) to act. Identity papers torn up recapitulate legal expulsion. relies on. Largely in response to such unpenalized.22 long rifle shootings of the early 1980s developed a second attack ritual: the unnecessary use of force by police and security officers against young “immigrant” banlieue men. An exclusive male citizenship is thus violently enacted through racist attacks. the targeting of children (and. white male) neighbors from their apartment windows using . and indeed has been central to the constitution of working-class white masculinity in certain contexts. and sports in the attacks just described. However. homes) signals acts of exclusion from the national family and from legitimate means of social reproduction.

These associations laid the groundwork for contemporary Amazigh activism. on the exact site where one of these victims. legalized immigrant associations which had been banned since 1939. as well as from local Jewish groups. Beur activism further drew broad support from Catholic social service organizations. Abdenbi Guemiah. and thus became a space for productive interfaith dialogue. precipitated the November 1982 foundation of the Association Gutenberg. the young Kader Lareiche. throughout. named for the suburban Nanterre housing project in which it was founded (Boubeker and Abdallah 1993: 65). had been killed by a night watchman three months earlier (Aïchoune 1985: 127–28. racist violence specifically targeting Franco-Maghrebis was the primary spur for Beur militancy. a discourse which has earned them (and Beur activism in general) the ire of Islamist social movements which arose in the French banlieues during the 1990s (see Kepel 1987). Likewise. The first independent movement of Beurs borrowed the English name Rock Against Police (RAP) and organized free concerts to increase public awareness of the murder of three FrancoMaghrebi teenage boys by police during the preceding four months. which maintains the discourse of multiculturalism and secularism embedded in the Beur movement. Kabyle academic and immigrant labor groups active in France since 1967 reconstituted themselves as cultural associations and attracted younger Beur participants with courses in Berber language (Tamazight) as well as in Berber dance. 1981. the . The Beur movement likewise was the springboard for the expansion of Berberist politics in France.
. held on May 15. which emphasized the “right to difference” (droit à la différence) within French identity.22 long rifle assassination of a community organizer. and provided funding for a variety of cultural and anti-racist activities. The second concert. Divisions between Beurs and Jews (“ feujs”) became increasingly manifest following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the growing identification of several Beur actors (via their association with Trotskyist political organizations) with the Palestinian cause (see Boukhedenna 1987).” the long-haired urban social bandit as emblematized by the Majid character in Mehdi Charef’s popular novel and film Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983). The Beur movement as a larger arts and popular culture scene also spurred early fantasies of cross-racial identification via the Beur figure of the “baba cool.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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lectively in opposition to the police in what subsequently became known as the “Beur movement. took place in the public housing complex Couzy in the Parisian suburb of Vitry. Jazouli 1992: 28). musical. and theatrical traditions. Yet.”9 The movement was encouraged by the newly elected socialist government of François Mitterrand.

its first action was to organize a protest against the deportation of Djamila. Male and female marchers displayed banners commemorating the young men killed during the summer and were greeted along the way with local memorials in suburban Vaulx-en-Velin (Lyon) and Nanterre (Paris) for residents killed during the previous year (Jazouli 1992: 60). had been seriously wounded several months earlier while attempting to intervene when policemen had unleashed their dogs on a group of young residents of Les Minguettes (Lyon). whose twenty-year-old president. they protect their own honor by regulating their sisters’ (and other female kin’s) sexuality. was to a great extent a response to the “murderous summer” of the previous months.’ which had been baptized ‘Beurs. who. the historical touchstone and unifying event for the “Beur movement. had been killed the previous month. 1994: 50).
. Drawing on their own idealization of North African domestic life and Muslim mores. For one participant.” The march.000 demonstrators from Marseille to Paris. In this way. with Lahouari Ben Mohammed. 1994: 40). or fictive kin (Bouamama et al. which mobilized over 100. The association was founded by the sister of Zahir Boudjlal. Ahmed Ghayet. which is to say. This movement of Beurette women to protect their “brothers” (frères)—literal or fictive—from the French state actually inverts standard gender relations in the banlieues.’ I would date from the 1983 March” (cited in Bouamama. a young resident of Busserine who had been arrested during the demonstration following the assassination of Lahouari. Franco-Maghrebi women as protectors of men contrasts with a masculine Beur political subjectivity described below: the violent avenger of fallen “brothers.” Such “novel subject positions” underwrote the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (known colloquially as the Marche des Beurs). which one has baptized today as the ‘banlieue youth. Toumi Djaidja. The event was organized by the Association SOS Avenir Minguettes. Franco-Maghrebi men generally adopt the role of being the protectors of women. and Djerdoubi. whether actual. the forging of the Beurs as a trans-suburban political generation corresponded to assassinations of young banlieue men who were seen by community organizers as “brothers” (frères). as in the case of Zahir Boudjlal. Sad-Saoud. the march formed the Beurs as a particular political and generational subjectivity: “The history of the youth.152
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The first French cultural association of Franco-Maghrebi women was formed in March 1981 in the Busserine outlying quarter of Marseilles under similar conditions. In other words. While the association had the explicit goal of documenting racist assassinations. Moreover. the constitution of a female Beur(ette) political subjectivity was itself historically predicated on male violence and its prevention.

engage police in a chase. following a police raid in the Cité de la Cayolle in Marseilles in which a number of women. because they didn’t understand the police’s aggressions towards them. The rage they had in themselves was directed at the cars” (cited in Jazouli 1992: 21–22). these “rodeos” (as they were locally called) were often (though certainly not always) understood by their participants as exercises in a particular agency delimited by the violence of the banlieues. the community took collective action. in Lyon. Djamel. In this engagement with the police. similar confrontations occurred in neighboring Venissieux (Lyon). . but also on their role as the subjects of violence. leading to the weeklong occupation of the housing project by a regiment of four thousand police officers. and then abandon and burn the vehicle. others felt such displays of passive solidarity to be ineffectual and demanded that a “blood price” (prix de sang) be paid (Bouamama et al. Two years later. The rodeos were to respond to everything they had undergone. if not sporting. 1994: 51). children.” This form of agentive subjectivity was inherited by the younger brothers of the Beur actors.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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If many Franco-Maghrebis participated in nonviolent actions like the march. quality. Les Minguettes exploded in a series of violent confrontations between young men and the police. under police custody if not a police officer himself. as the avengers of their “brothers” and defenders of their “parents. According to one local resident and community activist. young male residents fire-bombed the shopping centers and police stations throughout the area. could not be directly punished by the victim’s male kin. In an estimated 250 separate incidents. and the French state as a whole. as well as at the symbols of their economic exclusion in the cités. During the same period. young men of the Monmousseau cité of Les Minguettes engaged police in a violent struggle after the latter had broken into an apartment thought to contain stolen goods. . and elderly residents were injured. . During the same year. as well as disillusioned by the failure
. they and their parents. as the actual attacker. who by the 1990s found themselves further marginalized from the fruits of their parents’ labors. when a hunger strike protesting the expulsions of young Franco-Maghrebis failed to overturn the responsible legislation. Beur male subjectivity became premised not only on the men’s status as the objects of violence. and when shortly thereafter a young woman from neighboring Saint-Dizier was extradited to Algeria. However. While clearly having a pleasurable. directing their “rage” at the police force as a whole. groups of mostly Franco-Maghrebi (but also other banlieusards) boys would steal a car. “It was from the moment of police provocations that the youth began to become aggressive. In the summer of 1981.

youth programs. The point of this discussion is not to substantiate an Islamophobic portrayal of Muslim-French citizens as preternaturally or culturally violent. class-based community was viewed as having devolved into “ethnic and territorial gangs” involved in “endemic daily violence” that at best organized itself into a “riot” against the police (Jazouli 1992: 141–42). and racial lines—responding to the killing of one of their “brothers” by representatives of the state. but
. nor is it to claim that all violent acts are intentionally political in their enactment. clashes between youth and riot police (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité. In this representation of the cités. Through such responses. who asphyxiated after being denied his asthma medicine while in police custody. The repeated. the banlieue youth of the 1990s represented its dystopian obverse of dangerous social anomie. Increasingly. Many sociologists in France.154
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of multicultural identity politics associated with the Beur movement. These representations and the resulting state policies of further securitization of the cités continued up through and in response to the October–November 2005 wave of violence (see Silverstein and Tetreault 2006). For instance. or CRS) occurred in November 1990 in the Mas-du-Taureau cité of the Lyonnais suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin after the death of twenty-one-year-old resident Thomas Claudio in a motorcycle chase with police. ethnic. 1995). violent confrontations between cité youth and the police throughout the 1990s largely involved locally delineated groups—which crossed religious. the French state largely reinforced an image. described the banlieue youth as participating in a “riot culture” (culture de l’émeute) characterized by a generalized historical amnesia and “hate” (haine) directed indiscriminately at all symbols of the French state (Aïchoune 1991: 13). and Marshall Plan–style economic measures. As after the 1981 rodeos. popularized through the media and in the speeches of conservative political candidates. sometimes themselves former Beur activists. If the Beurs. of a banlieue youth increasingly “outside the law” (hors la loi). multicultural. as hybrid political subjects. the cités were portrayed by the police and media as “lawless zones [zones de non-droit] in which the law of the Republic is totally absent” (Le Monde. represented the utopian future of a “plural France” touted by Beur activists and socialist politicians whereby the young Franco-Maghrebi citizens served as icons of a multicultural future (Boubeker and Abdallah 1993: 43). and in May 1991 in Val-Fourré after the death of eighteen-year-old Aïssa Ihich. the government’s response to the contestation involved direct intervention into the everyday social life of the cités in the form of increased police presence. in March 1991 in Sartrouville (Paris) after the assassination of eighteen-year-old Djamel Chettouh by a Euromarché supermarket security guard. September 7.

but also gymnasiums.
Wars on Terror
As Vincent Geisser (2003) has discussed in his work on La Nouvelle Islamophobie (“The New Islamophobia”). and that this violence organizes suburban spaces of marginalization. even if such political movements were. schools. residents simply replace these sites with their own. a great diversity of Islamic associations. In this sense. shopping centers. it is of little wonder that the anti-police “riots” should target not only police stations. streamlined interpretations of the Quran and the science of hadith. these attacks entail occupation and appropriation. mosque structures. as local residents inscribe the sites. With the transnationalization of the violence of the Algerian civil war. in the case of the growth of parallel grassroots services in the shadows of these defunct institutions. While religious beliefs and practices remain quite diverse. it is to argue that this struggle is strongly local in its rubric. general fears of a banlieue “generation in revolt” have been translated into particular concerns of Franco-Maghrebi cité youth succumbing to the “temptation
. political. Moreover. tracing their lineage to various Sufi and Salafi movements originating from the Middle East. Or. the banlieue youth in question were by and large not motivated by global ideologies of Marxism or Islamism. and have rejected the “traditionalism” of their parents for modernist. through graffiti and tags. Kepel 1987). and West Africa (see Bowen 2009. Since the demise of the Beur movement and the beginning of the Algerian civil war. and activist organizations have prospered in France. as their own. oriented to the specific conditions of marginalization experienced by youth at the hands of the state and its socioeconomic agents and icons. and cultural dominance. particularly Islamic fundamentalist groups.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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rather to argue that the subject positions of male and female housing project residents (Beurs. and other such institutions associated with state economic. In its wake. beaufs. and banlieue residents more broadly) are constituted themselves in no small part in and through masculinized violence. many younger Franco-Maghrebi men and women have joined evangelical Islamic groups. present in the housing projects in question. the monopoly maintained by the state agencies of North African countries over the organization and transmission of Islamic knowledge and worship has largely broken down. As much as acts of destruction. the ostensible social chaos of cité youth (dis) organization became a further source of anxiety in that it was seen to leave open a vacuum for the rise of “communitarian” organizations. and continue to be. South Asia. Cesari 1994.

in the 1995 attempted bombing of a rail line outside Lyon that was attributed to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group. these two trajectories signified the birth of a third generation of immigrants in the 1990s. Originally conceived in 1978 and first introduced during the 1991 Gulf War. For French government officials and media pundits. In response to the summer 1995 bombings. 1995). arrests. and have positioned this subjectivity in opposition to French social-political belonging. transportation hubs. a Franco-Maghrebi from Mas-du-Taureau. In response. at which point it was elevated to a “reinforced” level of “high surveillance” of public institutions. were magnified by the post–September 11 arrest of French-Moroccan Zacarias Moussaoui as the “20th September 11th hijacker” and the discovery of several French citizens of North African parentage among Taliban forces in Afghanistan and among the “foreign fighters” in the Iraqi insurgency. mobilizing the military to guard schools. and. Like the USA Patriot Act. The life histories of two individuals in particular symbolized this fear: first. France’s homegrown war on terror has attempted to retake control of the cité frontiers and reincorporate them into the state’s economic and legal framework. the participation of Khaled Kelkal. August 16. in the case of undocumented migrants. The plan remained in effect until the September 11 attacks. The war has operated on two fronts that have both reinforced Franco-Maghrebi identification as particularly Muslim subjects. deportations. In the first place. North African youth have been particularly targeted by such “random searches” (contrôles au faciès). Pujadas and Salam 1995).156
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of Jihad” (cf. Security forces and intelligence agencies have conducted multiple sweeps (rafles) for suspected terrorists in the cités. the reinforced Vigipirate plan lowered the bar of probable cause and authorized extensive identity checks and property searches in public areas. resulting in countless judicial detentions. government buildings. and centers of tourism. These anxieties over suburban housing projects serving as a node in an international terrorist network that supposedly linked Algiers to Cologne to Sarajevo to Kabul to Iraq (cf. the French government activated the Vigipirate anti-terrorism plan to raise the level of public vigilance. the French government has increased police intervention and surveillance across the urban periphery in an explicit attempt to re-monopolize local violence. organizer and icon of the 1983 Marche des Beurs. breaking into prayer rooms and association locales. second. the plan operates according to a logic of armed deterrence. to a neotraditional form of Islam while serving a brief prison sentence. the conversion of Toumi Djaidja. Le Figaro. one founded in the transnational cross-linkages between youth indigenous to the French banlieues and those Islamist and Berberist militants who had fled the Algerian civil war to come live in France (Silverstein 2004b: 174–83).
.

The 1995 Vigipirate plan added 200 plainclothes inspectors to the already expanded suburban security forces to “penetrate the milieus of delinquency” (L’Express. Silverstein 2004a). when a substantial number of representatives from the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF) with supposed historical ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood won seats in the April 2003 elections. the French war on terror has involved the official recognition qua containment of Islam in France.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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In such identity checks. In the second place. thus eliminating previous “no-go areas.000 military gendarmes to patrol these same “sensitive urban zones. In 1999. he likewise criminalized congregations in the entries. and the creation of official French Councils of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) that would mediate between French Muslims and the state (Bowen 2006. domestic settings is not taken into account. law-and-order interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy further increased the regiments of cité security forces and gave them new powers to search homes and vehicles. the voices of the vast majority of Franco-Maghrebis who identify culturally as Muslims but do not actively practice their religion are silenced. This tying
. Fernando 2005. in 2003. they received a renewed push after September 11 when Sarkozy became determined to replace the Islam des caves (“Islam of garages and cellars”) with a controllable “Islam of the mosques. These policies provide the institutions and legal norms through which the government seeks to bring Islamic practice in line with French ideologies of laïcité. these efforts at creating an official Islam of France (as opposed to Islam in France) blurs the distinction between a Muslim community defined by practice (particularly mosque attendance) and one defined by self-identification. November 9. In particular. security agents interpellate Franco-Maghrebis as potential Islamist terrorists. As Mayanthi Fernando (2005) has emphasized.000 additional riot police and 17.” In an effort to destroy clandestine mosques and Islamic associations. the French government has sought to determine the parameters of Islamic practice in France through the official banning of headscarves in public schools. mobilizing 13. Islamic belief and practice that is mediated by informal organizational forms or private. and garages of public housing projects. Sarkozy threatened to expel imams whose views did not correspond to French law and to close their mosques. Likewise. While attempts to create such governing bodies have existed since 1989. Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin bolstered these measures.” Finally. basements. By tying the CFCM to mosque structures. These security measures have additionally focused on the cités as spaces of potential terror. 1995).” However.

Through these processes of self-identification and state interpellation. private practices and state policies have fostered a new racialization and deployment of religious categories. and Iraqis. they increasingly witness a reflection of the struggles they are undergoing in their daily lives. but rather that these were relatively flexible terms of address and reference that marked personal idiosyncrasies as much as ethno-religious roots. with local bandes (gangs) forming largely on the basis of residence. Franco-Maghrebis increasingly present themselves publicly as Muslims whose belonging to the French nation and loyalty to the French state is subsequently questioned. youth solidarity crossed these racialized boundaries. or renoi (black) had not been part of the banlieue vocabulary prior to the Algerian civil war. or the ongoing violence in Israel/Palestine. the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. mark local social struggle as expressions of a larger. however. feuj.S. In spite of obvious diplomatic and policy distinctions between France and the U. This is not to say that locally racialized categories of rabeu. while not excluding crossings of racial or religious frontiers. many of today’s Franco-Maghrebi youth see themselves additionally (if not primarily) as transnational Muslim subjects in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians. They re-interpret. Afghanis. when Franco-Maghrebis qua Muslims witness the events of September 11. transnational religious conflict which threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. New modes of religious identification. in other words. their battles with French forces of law and order as an intifada of their own. outline increasingly bounded modes of sociality which. the Israeli IDF. As Wieviorka (2007: 112) observes in what he calls “ghetto anti-Semitism” with global reach: “The experience of Muslims [in France] becomes an illustration of what Muslims are said to experience at [an] international level and is constantly associated with images of the Israeli domination of Palestinians and the violence inflicted on the Iraqi people by the Americans. and Israel. Whereas earlier forms of youth identification and organization during the 1980s and early 1990s had been based in shared diacritics of class and locality—being poor inhabitants of marginalized housing projects—that superseded divisions of race and religion and thus underwrote Vinz’s racial cross-identification as depicted in La Haine. Moreover. as a resistance to forces of imperialism. If their older brothers and sisters saw their struggles as intrinsically local and based in a larger fight for civic rights in France.” And this association of Islam with anti-imperial resistance
.158
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of Franco-Islamic representation to mosques thus privileges senior men at the expense of both women and younger men engaged in da‘wa. In other words. and the French riot police. young French Muslims make the implicit analogy between the American army.

the spike in reported anti-Semitic violence was accompanied by an even greater spike in racist and xenophobic violence particularly against Muslims in the wake of September 11 (Geisser 2003: 10–13). Moreover. statewide reporting guidelines that—particularly for schools where the vast majority of reported incidents occurred—streamlined the collection of data on race-related crimes and arguably overreported minor schoolyard incidents as hate crimes. of an anti-Muslim French state whose own history of anti-Semitic violence is ignored.”
The “New Anti-Semitism” Revisited
It is this shift in identification that helps explain the reported spike in antiSemitic violence in the early 2000s and its attribution in part to Muslim-French banlieue residents. “The Jews are resented quite simply because they are said to elude injustice and. Further. the abduction and murder of the French Jewish mobile phone salesman Ilan Halimi by a multi-ethnic group of young French men and women from the banlieues. not assimilated but fully integrated. in the past. the statistical rise must be. 2005). .The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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has bolstered the Islamophilia of local youth and contributed to the increased rates of conversion to Islam in the banlieues as a mode of “social protest” (Daynes 1999: 316). . As Wieviorka (2007: 140) and his colleagues poignantly conclude: “This ghetto anti-Semitism constitutes a historical paradox: those who. in an impressive turnaround. and have endured racist hatred have today become. “antiSemitism” should be defined as the targeting of Jews qua Jews for violence. the imagined root of the evils from which they themselves have suffered. but spearheaded by a young Muslim from Côte d’Ivoire. anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence has not. While anti-Semitic attacks have since decreased. Granted. this set of alliances—which racializes religion over class—implies a different orientation toward other racialized groups. the recent generation of cité youth tends to approach their Jewish co-residents as representatives of international imperialism and. As Brian Klug (2003) has convincingly argued. to a certain extent.
. can be re-examined. questioned given new. If previous struggles had unified all cité residents in opposition to beaufs or bourgeois Parisians (as the latter adopted cité styles as a mode of their own symbolic protest). March 21. they seem to be particularly well treated by France” (Wieviorka 2007: 109). lived in ghettos . with a 150 percent increase recorded by the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) during the same 2003–2004 period when anti-Semitic attacks rose 50 percent (Le Monde. ironically. In this light.

this distinction is crucial in differentiating antiZionism (i. one could make a strong case that it is a sure sign of their very integration into a French nation premised simultaneously on a disavowal of cultural difference and on an avowal of a “True France” of the countryside (a pays réel) historically connected to Catholic anti-Semitism. whatever the exact motivation of the attackers or their personal (old or new) anti-Semitic beliefs. which have appeared since 2002. as any given attack may follow a very different economic or racial or political logic. the killing did raise—for both French Jews and the French state—the specter of a renewed anti-Semitism. Rather. the attack cannot be assimilated into the narrative of a “new anti-Semitism” perpetrated by Muslims and tied to events in Israel/Palestine. “Ilan was Jewish. and lead to increased social mobilization against this form of racism. but because he was presumed to be rich. and Jews are rich” (Libération.e. the mastermind behind the abduction claimed that the kidnapping was purely motivated by financial goals—that Halimi was chosen not because he was a Jew per se. it is interesting to note the timing of the clarion calls from academics like Brenner (2002). to a call for greater policing of Islamism in France. Not only do these works correspond closely to the post–September 11 war on terror.e. Or. encourage several thousand Jews to emigrate to Israel (as Laura’s family did at the end of La Petite Jérusalem). 2006). Indeed. In this sense.160
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repression. has made its political bed on xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. February 23. In this sense. Rather than seeing acts of violence by Muslim youth on Jewish people and property as a failure of republican integration. regardless of the nature of any given attack. Trigano (2003). not every attack on Jews is necessarily an anti-Semitic attack. In the case of Halimi. as another of the abductors claimed. as observers like Brenner (2002) and Trigano (2003) would have it. ironically again. attacks such as that on Halimi point to how some young MuslimFrench citizens share ideological space with an anti-Semitic extreme right that. In this light. or derision. Taguieff (2004). and Finkielkraut (2003). a racism against a people).10 Moreover. it seems to be connected to an older anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew-as-financier. one which has endured in the historical rhetoric of the French far right and has been further appropriated into contemporary Islamist ideology in France and abroad.. a political platform against a greater Israel) from anti-Semitism (i. it is an old sociological saw (and not an inherently false one) to take an immigrant group’s racism against those who arrived more recently as an index of their assimilation.. all of which points to the fact that there may exist a social reality of anti-Semitism in France. some of which has clearly been assimilated into banlieue common sense. but they also can be read as reactions to the incorporation of Muslim French via the state-run French
. Moreover.

In general. Jews are “good to think” for Amazigh activists. adopting instead an avowedly philo-Semitic (if not pro-Zionist) discourse (see Silverstein 2007). emphasizing instead the historical (if ambivalent) separation of religious and political spheres in Berber customary law and decision making. in the words of former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. they have rejected the generalized anti-Zionist (and occasionally anti-Semitic) politics of the Islamic world. differently integrated political subjects is by no means inevitable. they provide the basis for the organization of social categories of Amazigh selves and others.
Amazigh Imagination
Yet the mutual resentment of Muslims and Jews in France as differently positioned. colonial ethnologists treated Berbers as exceptionally suitable for French civilization due to their supposedly minimal and superficial Islamization. A cardinal example of the former are Berber (or Amazigh) activists in France and North Africa. Moreover. Trigano (2003: 15–17) explicitly rejects comparisons of the French Muslim and Jewish “communities” as commensurable groups who can be interpreted as being in conflict. Jews function totemically for Amazigh militants as a people similarly marginalized under the historic mantle of Arabo-Islamic hegemony in the Middle East and North Africa. organizations which seek explicitly. and transnational organizations (the World Amazigh Congress)—have concurred with the colonial stereotype and have embraced the heteropraxy and pre-Islamic origins of popular modes of Berber religious practice. More generally.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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Councils of the Muslim Faith. in that.12 Many of today’s Berber activists across France and North Africa—organized in cultural associations. like the totemic natural species Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) analyzed. It would not be unreasonable to describe this alarmist literature as a hostile (if not Islamophobic) reaction to the incorporation of Muslims as full-fledged citizens of France. Philia as well as phobia may characterize intercommunal relations in France. the activists have rejected Islam as their primary mode of identification. Indeed.11 As mentioned earlier. to “bring Islam to the table of the Republic” on the same terms as the Jewish Consistories previously established by Napoléon. whose relationship to Islam. political parties (such as the Front des Forces Socialistes and Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocratie of Algeria). activists see in the Zionist movement a model for the Amazigh struggle: the successful codification
. and anti-Semitism is quite unlike that of Muslim French more commonly represented in international media. In general. secularism. umbrella social movements (such as the Mouvement Culturel Berbère of Algeria and the Mouvement Amazigh of Morocco).

13 The festival occurs one month after Eid al-Adha and ritually closes the end of the year holiday. Personified Jews. with certain performers even cross-dressing to portray female tudayen. They engage in hypersexualized flirting (taqrefeyt) with each other. to pagan rituals of social renewal. around a masquerade festival known locally as Udayen Achour (Jewish Ashura). and sometimes gender inversion. More generally they act and talk outrageously. and are uniformly portrayed by Berber Muslims in the same grotesque. in which the fertility of the soil was regenerated through the symbolic death and rebirth of the agricultural god. dried morsels of the slaughtered ram eaten in a communal couscous. where young men. Perhaps the most poignant example of Amazigh philo-Semitism and ethno-religious cross-identification occurs in the southeastern Moroccan town of Goulmima. sexualized fashion displayed in the Goulmima festival. Given this imagery. “slaves”). On the face of it. Beginning in the early-1990s. cf. and have publicly advocated a normalization of relations with Israel. through the expulsion of evil via scapegoats (Hammoudi 1993: 15–32. in Frazerian fashion.162
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and preservation of a threatened language. the masquerade replicates those inversion dramas found throughout Berber North Africa that were historically performed between the Eid and Ashura. are generally interpreted as functioning as such scapegoats. in a manner that satirizes local religious and government authority figures. referring to themselves as udayen (“Jews”). religious. Colonial observers. as well as more marginal characters of town life (such as beggars. town residents gather outside the village walls. with the last. since Moroccan independence. and drug users)—behavior and speech acts that would be practically impossible under everyday social norms. and the obtaining of political and territorial autonomy with the establishment of the state of Israel. Berber masquerades have. as well as with the young women spectating on the periphery of the carnival. in their search for a primordial “Berber religion. prostitutes.” typically linked these performances. 167). After the meal. Laoust 1921: 254).
. provoked the ire of Islamic reformers who decry the events as “vestiges of paganism (jahiliyya)” that threaten to infect everyday social comportment and destroy Muslim virtues (Hammoudi 1993: 89. delegations of French-Kabyle artists and intellectuals visited Israel and published reports of their voyages in Amazigh newsletters and blogs that circulated across France and North Africa. While by no means the agents of the Israeli state that Islamists occasionally accuse them of being. where Berber participants literally put on Jew-face and perform a ritual of ethnic. sport grotesque masks and outfits designed to hide their identities. Amazigh militants have actively sought to reconcile Jewish and Berber populations. as well as blacks (ismakhen.

they greet each other with the supposedly Hebrew “Tchafou. Social positions of “Muslim” and “Jew” in the contemporary. Through their wholehearted support for laïcité. Amazigh philoSemitism represents a racial project of national and transnational inclusion. Underlining the Jewish nature of the event. by the colonial administrations of North Africa—a distinction which better reflected metropolitan social castes than the state of communal interactions in pre-colonial North African societies—gained social facticity as it was reproduced in political
. The legal separation of Jews from Muslims. terrorism. postcolonial French Mediterranean emerge from a long history of fantasy and violence in which various actors who are today identified (and self-identify) along these taken-for-granted religious axes have been differentially placed visà-vis various state practices of exclusion and assimilation. and ultimate defenders of the French Republic. They proudly relate how in 2000 masked youth even provoked a fatwa from the local imam by carrying signs written in both Hebrew and Arabic that argued for a rapprochement with Israel. needs to recognize moments when categories of analysis fragment. who have been negatively stereotyped in the West as being prone to fundamentalism. make pilgrimages to the old Jewish quarter (mellah). and of imagined crosscommunal identification that remaps the globe in contradistinction to the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric. represented as and transformed by Amazigh activists into a celebration—rather than a mockery or symbolic expulsion—of Judeo-Berber culture. Although they recognize its timing on the Islamic lunar calendar. they disassociate it from the Eid sacrifice or the larger celebrations of Ashura as the Feast of the Muslim New Year. Putting on Jew-face thus serves to strengthen Berber activists’ self-presentation as modern cosmopolitans and as Europeans through their claims to solidarity. of anti-anti-Semitism and cosmopolitan secularism. Like the colonial ethnologists and Islamic reformists. and work Hebrew writing and six-pointed stars into their costumes. Any analysis of contemporary Islamophobia and Islamophilia.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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Udayen Achour represents a pared-down version of this ritual. local Amazigh militants emphasize the masquerade’s pre-Islamic genealogy and even attribute its origin to a Jewish ritual revived by activists in recent memory.” sing songs featuring Jewish characters invoked to replenish the local river’s water supply. if not identification. Amazigh activists present themselves as the “good Muslim” immigrants. and later Arabs from Berbers. with Jews. and anti-Semitism. Such philo-Semitism (if not proZionism) helps activists distinguish themselves from Arab Muslims. In this respect. as well as antiSemitism and philo-Semitism.

Institute of Peace and the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program. with an outspoken Amazigh activism continuing to challenge the unquestioned pro-Palestinian orientation of Franco-Maghrebi politics. as I discuss above. and as Jews vacillate between objects of racial and religious revulsion and icons of cosmopolitan modernity. For comments and suggestions on various drafts. Emmanuel Saadia. countering anti-Semitism with its own philoSemitic and occasionally Islamophobic rhetoric. Barbara Rosenbaum. as I have tried to insist. and the various participants in the conferences and workshops organized by the Koebner Center for German History of the Hebrew University
. In France. the problematization and surveillance of certain Muslim subjects in relation to their potential for religious extremism only gained currency.164
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power imbalances in newly independent Algeria and Morocco.
Notes
An earlier version of this essay appeared as the “Context of Antisemitism and Islamophobia in France” in Patterns of Prejudice 42(1) (2008): 1–26. of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism—that re-imagine social interaction and belonging beyond the poles of love and hate. The author thanks Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint. It is the contemporary challenge of the multiply hybrid subjects around the French Mediterranean to find new spaces of solidarity and new modes of identification that avoid the extremist rhetorics of Islamophobia and Islamophilia. of solidarity and exclusion. the author would like to thank John Bunzl.” so too has it served to divide Berbers and Arabs into “good” and “bad” Muslims—to follow Mahmood Mamdani’s critique (2004)—as measured by their relative avowal of the rights of women. and thus the resulting anti-Zionist (and occasionally anti-Semitic) orientation of current French street politics. Brian Klug. in relation to the “war on terror” waged since the mid-1990s. as well as in immigrant housing and policing policies in France. Even so. as marginalized Muslim populations become at various moments embraced as fantasy objects of national regeneration or anti-imperialist protest. the self-presentation and subsequent interpellation of Franco-Maghrebis as “Muslims” underwrites contemporary avowals of solidarity of banlieusards with occupied Iraq and Palestine. homosexuals. If the contemporary rhetoric of the “war on terror” has fragmented French Jews around their political support for Israel and alarmism over the rise of the “new anti-Semitism. and at others demonized as perpetrators of violence and barbarity. Research was funded in part by generous grants from the U. even this trajectory has been contested throughout.S. Andrew Shryock. France and its postcolonial North African periphery thus remains marked by an ambivalence of identification and disidentification. Yet. and Jews. the anonymous reviewer for Indiana University Press.

Note that while the category of “ Muslim French” (Français musulmans or Musulmans en/de France) as deployed in France nominally includes Muslims of sub-Saharan African. French domestic intelligence reports indicate as many as 100.000 converts in France and report that Muslims constitute up to 50 percent of the prison population (Smith 2004. See also Peace (2009). the young men on the street were primarily organized according to ties of residence and socioeconomic marginalization that transcended ethnic and religious differences. 5. since 2002. For critical discussions of the appropriateness of the terminology “(new) anti-Semitism” and “Islamophobia” for denominating current racism against Jews and Muslims in France. whether taking place in the public spheres of pro-Israel
. Calls for calm by local Islamic associations and even a fatwa against the violence by the supposedly fundamentalist Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF) fell on deaf ears. where various earlier versions of the paper were presented. Finkielkraut. in their comprehensive survey of anti-Semitic attitudes in France. For a parallel analysis and critique of the discourse of the “new anti-Semitism” as a form of a “new Islamophobia. the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. the focus of French media and state attention has been on French North Africans considered most susceptible to Islamist preaching (da‘wa) and most responsible for the reported rise in anti-Semitism. as well as the various commentaries which followed this article and emphasized the larger colonial/postcolonial dynamic of the various racisms. Turkish. See Silverstein and Tetreault (2006). attempt to formulate a balanced analysis that simultaneously recognizes the social challenge of increased antiSemitism in France while warning against succumbing to the moral panic encouraged by authors like Brenner. Note that not all contemporary public violence by children of North African immigrants necessarily follows a logic of religious interpellation and invocation. 2.K.” see Geisser (2003: 77–93). Peace (2009: 118–21). In the October–November 2005 wave of urban violence in the peripheral housing projects of France. the U. See also Balibar et al. see Bunzl (2005). Faculty Forum for Israel-Palestine Peace. “Anti-Semitism” technically references an older racial typology where Jews (as well as Arabs) were reviled as “Semites. 3. Whitlock 2006).” “Islamophobia” registers a psychological fear of Islamic religion. and the Human Rights Workshop of the University of Chicago. and as such I continue to use them throughout this essay. Wieviorka (2007: 62–68). and Trigano. Nonetheless. these are the terms in which the French debate has been addressed. 4. Michel Wieviorka (2007) and his research team. along with converts to Islam. in spite of presumptions by certain Islamophobic critics (see the interview with Alain Finkielkraut in Mishani and Smotriez [2005]). 1. (2003) and Vidal (2003) for similar skepticism. rather than the structural discrimination and racialized discourse against Muslims which is at issue. My essay follows very much in this project. For a discussion of the respective roles of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in indexing positions of nationalism and pan-nationalism within the broader field of Europe. Indeed. Taguieff. see Bowen (2005: 524). and South Asian descent. there has been a significant increase in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attacks by North African Jews.The Fantasy and Violence of Religious Imagination
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of Jerusalem.

6. see Silverstein (2008). In this sense. President Jacques Chirac publicly stated that what remained important was that such an attack could very well have occurred.166
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rallies. In point of fact. Otherwise. MacMaster (1997). fully in realization that such a term does not correspond to local naming practices. while purely imaginary. Liauzu (1996). though others have postulated that it could be an acronym for Berbères d’Europe (Aïchoune 1985). Talha (1989). and public apologies. and Wihtol de Wenden (1991) for extended histories of colonial-era racism and violence against Algerians in France. and quickly disavowed by Franco-Maghrebis. 10. The self-appellation currently in use is “rebeu” (a single verlan inversion of arabe). and that the hyphenation better indexes Anglo-American understandings of identity than French Republican expectations of the erasure of ethnic and religious diacritics from political belonging. When the woman later admitted that she had made up the attack. I use the analytical appellation Franco-Maghrebi. The event elicited cries of outrage from Jewish and anti-racist organizations. who today see the Beur movement as either a political failure or a government manipulation. continued to function as a social fact with real-world effects. see Geisser (2003: 10–13). promises of redress. 8. See MacMaster (1997). The term is generally considered to be a double syllabic inversion of arabe according to the language game of verlan. I have discussed Amazigh laïcité and philo-Semitism at length in Silverstein (2007). 11. On the more general rise of anti-Muslim attacks in France since the late 1990s. and Zehraoui (1994). 12. The academician Louis Bertrand (1930 [1889]: 8–13) was particularly outspoken in his fantasies of a “new Latin race” created in the fusion of French settlers and Berbers whose “barbarity” would “rejuvenate” French civilization and lead to a “national regeneration. I use the term “Beur” only in reference to Franco-Maghrebi activists and fellow travelers of the 1980s. For an expanded discussion of the performativity of violence in constituting categories of racial identification. Noiriel (1988). In one heavily reported and debated incident from 2004. the attack. see Gillette and Sayad (1976). Hargreaves (1995).” 7. The term was subsequently adopted by the French media and academia. The ethnonym “Beur” was adopted in the early 1980s by young Franco-Maghrebi men and women to indicate their double separation from their parents’ “Arab” culture (often characterized pejoratively) and from normative Frenchness and the expectations of cultural assimilation that attended the latter. and stiffer penalties for anti-Semitic crimes from the government. or “off-line” in terms of street attacks and mosque burnings (Shatz 2005). Sayad (2004). For histories and analyses of Algerian immigration to France. 9. while others going as far as to excise all references to God from their spoken language and to harbor scarcely hidden contempt for the believers among their
. a young woman claimed to have been attacked on a Parisian commuter train by a group of youths who drew a swastika on her chest. with some militants engaging in regular prayer and following Islamic dietary restrictions. In this essay. Amazigh activists—like Berber-speakers throughout North Africa and the diaspora—incorporate a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices into their everyday lives.

7
German Converts to Islam and Their Ambivalent Relations with Immigrant Muslims
Esra Özyürek
“I would never have become a Muslim if I had met Muslims before I met Islam.
Embracing Islam in an Islamophobic Context
Islamophobia is rapidly increasing in Europe. the exclusion of Muslims has become an essential element of European self172
.2 a substantial portion of German Muslims are quite discontented with born Muslims. This paper is an attempt to comprehend the paradoxical feelings of love and hate for Islam and Muslims that many German Muslims experience. whose family never accepted her. it was uttered by a self-declared German imam who had converted to Islam while trying to convert Arabs and Turks to Christianity. My aim in exploring this issue is to understand what it takes to be a (supposed) Islamophile in a political and social context that is highly Islamophobic. the comment was made by a fifty-year-old man who converted to Islam about thirty years ago after meeting Iranians who came to Europe to collect money and organize for the Iranian revolution. The third time.1 The first time. The second time. In the post–Berlin Wall era. Although all of the several dozen German converts I talked to (and the dozens of converts whose narratives I read on the internet) claim that they embraced Islam in a context of significant personal relationships with Muslims. especially those of immigrant backgrounds.” I heard these words over and over again during my yearlong ethnographic research among ethnic German converts to Islam in Berlin. After that I stopped counting. the speaker was a twenty-five-year-old former East German woman who came to Islam through her Bosnian boyfriend.

regional German governments have resisted granting Islam the status of a state-recognized religion. more ethnic Europeans are embracing Islam. Denmark (Jensen 2006). Despite these unfavorable conditions. the Netherlands (Van Nieuwkerk 2004). Today there are more converts in France. Rouse 2004). There is a budding literature on converts to Islam in the Christian-majority societies of Europe (Van Nieuwkerk 2006. Le Pen’s National Front Party in France. Jackson 2005. Roald 2004. as Islamophobia becomes more prevalent. new German Muslims carry great symbolic weight in German society. and the Swiss People’s Party have successfully based their election campaigns on anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim positions. the Flemish Interest Party in Belgium. despite the fact that Islam is one of the most actively practiced religions in Germany. few of these studies (Roald 2004) emphasize the fact that these converts choose to embrace a minority religion in contexts where Islam and Muslims are feared. and numerous political parties.” Because this conversion process is so simple and requires no registration. Britain (Köse 1996). they attract negative public attention disproportional to their numbers and are often suspected of being potential threats to the nation (Özyürek 2008). Italy. and new kinds of discrimination of which
. Sweden (Roald 2004). Muslim immigrants are consistently discriminated against in Germany. At an institutional level. Estimates range from 20.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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definition (Asad 2003: 164). marginalized. and Islam itself is not generally respected. suspicion from both the majority and the minority group. Özyürek 2009). Mansson 2002) and North America (Hermansen 1999.3 Furthermore. and forced to assimilate. Jonker 2000. Ironically. Wohlrab-Sahr 1999. ethnic Germans are steadily embracing Islam by reciting the Islamic creed in the presence of at least two witnesses.000 to 100. as they are in most European countries. declaring their belief that “there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God. a status that would allow Muslims to teach about Islam in public schools and make use of taxes imposed on mosques by state authorities (Fetzer and Soper 2005. discriminated against. and Germany (Wohlrab-Sahr 1999) than ever before. Regardless of their exact numbers. Although informative about the kinds of processes individuals pass through when they convert. there is no reliable figure regarding the number of new German Muslims. Converts coming to the minority religion from the majority religion typically face exclusion from their earlier group affiliations. hated. including Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria (Bunzl 2005).000. Converting to any minority religion is a difficult process. They play a central role in Muslim organizations nationwide and have become important mediators between Muslim communities and the majority society (Özyürek 2007).

They are eager to underline the fact that Muslims and Islam are two different things. non-Muslim German intellectuals. by making immigrant Muslims leave their Middle Eastern or African cultures and traditions behind and persuading them to apply fundamental Islamic teachings in their everyday lives. an ethnic Swedish convert to Islam and a professor of religious studies at the University of Lund. nor through reforming Islam. but. and
.
Muslim Tradition and Islamic Essence
Anne Sofie Roald (2006). Although many German Muslims identify with born Muslims and many others spend a good portion of their time fighting to improve conditions for Muslims of immigrant backgrounds in Germany. In other words. on the contrary. The discrimination to which converts are subject often comes as a surprise to them. Before people used to call me ‘sunshine’ because my hair is really blond. many other (and sometimes the very same) new German Muslims try to distance themselves and Islam itself from born Muslims in Germany and the Middle East. In this essay I discuss strategies some German Muslims have developed to defend their choice in this highly Islamophobic context. because Islam is a persistently and negatively Othered religion. and at times subjected to acts of violence.”4 Elsewhere I have argued that German converts to Islam are under extreme pressure because they are accused of being traitors to German society and are even perceived as potential terrorists (Özyürek 2008). Like non-converted. this transformation should happen not through leaving Islamic practices behind. the German converts argue. and maturity. One German Muslim woman who converted to Islam in her early twenties and donned the Islamic headscarf described how shocking this process has been for her: “I didn’t expect so many negative reactions.5 In their personal lives. Especially men used to always compliment me for my hair. But for them. and transformed. as atheist left-wing Germans would suggest. the stakes are even higher. Maybe someone with dark skin knows better how to deal with this feeling. not Islam. argues that converts go through a three-stage developmental process of love. In the first stage converts become fascinated with everything born Muslims do. many converts believe that immigrant Muslims need to be educated. But I really didn’t expect things to change so fast and so dramatically. as center-right-wing Christian Democrats would support. German Muslims are constantly questioned. disappointment. Now when people look at me they only see an oppressed woman. convert to Islam. But when ethnic Europeans. integrated.174
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they were previously unaware. Germans in our case. feared. it is Muslims who need to change.

marginalized Muslim immigrants. or treated as. and Hofmann (1997) in Germany argue that women converts find Islam’s well-defined gender roles and boundaries especially attractive. Sultan (1999) in Sweden. where they develop a healthy distance from other Muslims and integrate Islam into their own identity. Hence German Muslims often find themselves in a position to confront common public perceptions about gender relations in Islam. violent. and non-democratic. However.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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they believe born Muslims are expressions of perfection. Before their conversion to Islam. converts move to the stage of maturity. especially women. Van Nieuwkerk (2006) in the Netherlands. all the while remaining dedicated to Islam. It is likely that any convert to a new religion or even to a new political movement goes through such developmental stages. case. honor killing. Moreover. and particularly the German. or Italian. Roald claims that many new Muslims leave the religion at this stage. At this stage. Yet in the Northern European. debates about domestic policy relating to Muslims often center on how to regulate and control immigrant behavior in matters of gender and sexuality. or French) individuals who live within an Islamic frame. Because concerns about Islam in much of contemporary Western Europe and especially in Germany are focused mainly on immigrants. even if converts have never concentrated on these depictions. and domestic violence. suddenly find themselves mistaken for. German Muslims find themselves in a position to defend anything and everything Muslims do. After they convert. they become disillusioned as they realize many Muslims do not live up to normative or ideal Islamic standards. Gradually. Differentiating between “religion” and “tradition” is important for newcomers to the religion and individuals who engage in Islamic reform. German Muslims grow up in a society where Muslim practices are seen as inferior to German practices. New German Muslims must repeatedly discuss heavily criticized practices associated with Muslims. might be choosing Islam. They adopt a strategy of defining these practices as immigrant cultural traditions that are not properly Islamic. In the second stage of disappointment. this discourse also allows German Muslims to distance themselves from born Muslims and their stigmatized practices. including forced marriage. sexist. there is more reason for converts to find themselves in the second stage and to stay there for an extended period. they come to the realization that they are Scandinavian (or German. converts.6 Scholars of ethnic European conversion to Islam point to different reasons why converts. Hofmann (1997) argues that strict separation of gender roles and the celebration of motherhood have been central to Ger-
. Muslim culture is essentialized and coded as irrational. especially women who don the headscarf.

Muslim women have all the rights German women enjoy and more. she slowly adopted Islamic practices such as not eating pork. he was working as a DJ in the hotel where Aarika was staying. but that recent public challenges to these concepts as a result of the women’s liberation movement. she rents an apartment for them to stay in since her husband shares a room with several other co-workers in the hotel where he is employed. She takes it upon herself to defend Islam by telling everyone that practices that lower the status of women are merely Middle Eastern and if immigrants had studied their Islam properly. and praying. she learned about Islam a few years ago during a trip to Egypt. when I was invited to dinner by Aarika and her mother in the house they share in Potsdam. fasting. is very critical of what she sees as the lower status of women in many immigrant Muslim families. She told me that what surprised her the most about Egyptians was how giving and content they were. When I met her. According to Van Nieuwkerk (2006). Aarika defends her independent position as perfectly Islamic and the oppressed position of many Muslim women as merely a reflection of their local traditions. attractive woman in her forties. Even though Hasan does not practice Islam. she told me. not drinking alcohol. Her husband learned about Aarika’s conversion when she wanted to have an Islamic marriage with him. She also met her current husband. as well as continuing expectations that women be dedicated mothers. When she does. unable to speak the language or find a job. After reading about Islam for a year or so on her own. sometimes converts find what fascinated them about Islamic gender roles troubling after a while. Eventually she converted in a little mosque in Berlin. However. even though they had so little compared to her. Because Aarika does not want to lose her well-paying position. knowing him and other people in Egypt was an opportunity for Aarika to learn about Islam. successful. Hasan. the primacy given to traditional female roles and their public celebration in Islam brings a sense of balance to converts. especially when they become more familiar with how these roles are practiced in Muslim communities (Badran 2006). One evening. and he was quite shocked. on that trip. Currently she is the manager of the Berlin branch of an expensive Italian fashion store. The fact that in her twenties she used to be a fashion model in East Berlin did not surprise me at all. My friend Aarika. He asks what kind of a man he would be. a town just outside Berlin in the former East
. they would know better. are troubling for many German women. Aarika was an independent. she continues to live in Berlin and visits her husband four times a year in Egypt. a German convert to Islam. After having grown up in a typically atheist East German family.176
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man culture as well. is not interested in coming to Berlin. Her husband.

I found that many ethnic German Muslims are keen to differentiate themselves from Muslims of immigrant background and to establish their identity as German Muslims. they would know that it is their duty to smile at everyone. never talk to Germans even when they ask for directions or the time. Like many other former East Germans.
Distancing from Immigrant Muslims
Almost all new German Muslims I talked to or read about had met Islam through a meaningful relationship with a born Muslim.7 Immigrant Muslim lovers. If. She complained that Turkish women always walk behind their husbands. have too many children.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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Germany. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (1999) argues that for some German Muslims conversion becomes a means to immerse themselves in new and alien cultures. Aarika’s mother started to tell me story after story about how rude Turks are. When she learned that I am from Turkey. Then she said to me. neighbors. she cannot stand Muslim immigrants. “I always tell her that these are the traditions. and if these people were to educate themselves better as Muslims. It is likely that German Muslim identity became an option only after the ethnic German Muslim community reached a critical mass. Nevertheless. most converts had significant born-Muslim individuals in their lives. I witnessed one of the frequent exchanges they have about Muslims. or born Muslims who are part of Islamic reform movements. best friends in Germany. for example. even when they do not know the people. and romantic or friendly relationships established with born Muslims during travel to Muslim-majority holiday destinations have been crucial in transforming lives. and that they should be nice to them. In many cases. When I turned to Aarika for help in the difficult position I found myself in as a guest. they would know that they shouldn’t behave like that. but are products of local cultures. Aarika believes that many Muslim practices have little to do with Islam. however. or Ossies. which
. spouses. especially in the earlier phases of conversion. it is difficult to know whether these personal connections with born Muslims came out of or followed the earlier fascination of the pre-conversion German with Islam and Muslim culture. and push you out of the way with their elbows in the subway or in a store. especially Turks. In my experience. they had read the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Such affiliations with Otherness might be the case for some new Muslims.” Like many other Muslim converts. I was surprised to see my friend nodding enthusiastically and not taking a step to defend the Turkish people. Aarika’s mother is supportive of her new religion as long as she does not cover her hair.

stylishly wrapped headscarves and long skirts. newly restored Mitte. I heard some customers giggling. As I was enjoying my lunch on a summer day on Kastanienalle. like Pankow. Ada told me that she chose this neighborhood because it is quiet. Areas such as Neukölln. the nature of segregation did not become clear to me until I had lunch one day in the chic. safe. most Berliners do not often travel to other neighborhoods and like to do most of their shopping and dining in their own parts of the city. few immigrant Muslims choose to live in these neighborhoods. Some kept laughing and talking about them even after they had passed by. Although many German Muslims choose to live in immigrant Muslim neighborhood. Because I traveled widely throughout the city. thirty-something ethnic Germans. she was already a Muslim but was not wearing a headscarf. When I looked at what they were laughing at.000 of them from Muslim-majority countries. This area is now inhabited by upwardly mobile.10 As a former resident of East Germany. and is a very ethnically segregated city. did not receive “guest workers” from Turkey in the 1970s and are still occupied mainly by ethnic Germans. and has big green parks where she can take her four-year-old son. When she moved into her current apartment building as a single mother. Dur-
. in what was formerly East Berlin.9 Both for historical reasons and because many of these areas are strongholds of neo-Nazi groups. they are very unlikely in the eastern neighborhoods. which she wrapped tightly around her head. my German Muslim friend Ada continued living in Pankow after she converted. It is not uncommon for darker-skinned people to be beaten up and harassed in these areas. especially those located on what used to be the east side of the Berlin Wall. Berlin houses a large number of immigrant residents. hip. Wedding.8 One determining factor in a convert’s decision to affiliate or disaffiliate with immigrant Muslims is location of residence. and Kreuzberg are dominated by residents of Muslim backgrounds. After she began wearing a headscarf. I saw two young women quietly walking down the street with colorful. keeping a friendly distance. At that moment I realized that. with established “no entry” zones declared and controlled by neo-Nazis. Other parts of the city. Pankow is one of the least immigrant-friendly neighborhoods. although such women are a common sight in many neighborhoods in Berlin. especially if they are married to an immigrant Muslim. others make a clear decision to live outside these neighborhoods. most of whom came to the city after the fall of the Wall. Soon most customers in the restaurant stopped their lunch to look at them. clean. She found her neighbors quite nice and polite. at least 200. Ada’s neighbors became very unfriendly to her.178
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might not have been the case when Wohlrab-Sahr conducted her research in the early 1990s. In fact.

“Oh. even ordinary. Ada herself did not conclude that this might have happened because of her lifestyle. I asked her why she does not move to another neighborhood. she participated in a project organized by Inssan. who cannot afford to live elsewhere. The police never found the criminals. Ada has very real concerns. highest crime. and said. She baked cookies and attached them to each neighbor’s door with a note saying. a small Muslim organization that aims at improving dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. Neukölln is an immigrant ghetto occupied mainly by Turks and Arabs. since I myself was living in the chic former East Berlin neighborhood of Mitte. The worst incident that happened to Ada in her neighborhood was the morning she woke up to find that her car had been torched. even though she finds it difficult to attain this status as a single mother. She hopes to be an educated. however. Some Germans. But when their children reach school age they move to another neighborhood. She looked at me with a flash of astonishment in her eyes.” a statement that caused a political scandal. and others. and highest school dropout rate. That is such a dirty neighborhood! Besides. I do not want my son to grow up among immigrants. she told me that all the other cars on the street were untouched and she had never seen such a thing in her neighborhood before. After Ada complained to me so much about Pankow and her neighbors. upwardly mobile Muslim. Even for the students who stay in school.” The idea behind the gesture was that this would be a good opportunity for Muslims to meet their non-Muslim neighbors and teach them about their practices. Actually. For Ada. I cannot live in Neukölln. although they took the sign and cookies from their door. In her apartment building not a single neighbor said a word to Ada.” Needless to say. where it would be quite acceptable. When I told her what I suspected. education is so bad that the mayor of Berlin recently said. some immigrant families also move out of these neighborhoods in order to send their children to schools with German children. given the high rate of neo-Nazi hate crimes in the neighborhood. causing the schools in these areas to be segregated. When I asked her more questions about the incident. who like the lively multicultural life of such neighborhoods. especially poor and marginalized ones. It is the poorest neighborhood in Berlin. will reside in such places. she looked a little surprised but said it was possible. as soon as they can afford it. “I would never send my own children to a school in Neukölln. it is important not to identify and mix with immigrant Muslims. to wear a headscarf.
. with the lowest employment rate. such as Neukölln or Kreuzberg. “Your Muslim neighbor greets you for the Muslim Sacrifice Feast.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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ing a Muslim feast. where they can have a better education and keep themselves out of trouble.

This community is a branch of the Murabitun. I noticed that the only foreigners were from Spain. Intermarriage among these branches is common.180
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Some ethnic Germans. He and his Turkish-German wife moved to Neukölln. especially those who have born-Muslim spouses. I participated in several of their meetings in their beautiful gathering house on Sunday mornings. including collection and redistribution of the Islamic tax. where there are branches of the community. half-Egyptian woman born and raised in Germany and married to a German man. practically immigrant-free tourist town housing Prussian palaces. and disgusting. but she wanted a big flat so we moved to Neukölln. who is urinating on our door? Not the German junkies but Turks. the United Kingdom. I told this to my wife. his wife had taken him to divorce court and was suing for custody of their only child. They both attended weekly meetings but were outsiders. Islamische Zeitung. Spain.
. They are dirty. inviting people to meet German Muslims. I asked her. But after living here. When I met him. Recently a young girl was burned in a park. Miles saw Muslim ignorance of their own religion as the main cause of their current marginalization in society. They only care about their own bellies. the community was also deciding to isolate itself from immigrant Muslims. ugly. By choosing to locate in Potsdam. a charming. These events were advertised in the German-only newspaper published by the group. which then spread to Christian-majority countries such as the United Kingdom. was one such example. while others do not enjoy the experience. Jahiliyya [pre-Islamic ignorance] is the biggest enemy of Muslims living here. He told me about his experience in the neighborhood in the following words: “At first I thought Turkish parents educate their children in Islamic way. I also met one Turkish woman and one half-German. Miles. low-income neighborhoods. and South Africa. One Muslim community I met during my research that made the most explicit effort to distinguish itself from immigrant Muslim communities in Berlin is the Weimar community in Potsdam. first established in Morocco in the late 1960s. The group lives communally and emphasizes a social welfare system.” Like other converts. No doubt this turn of events contributed to his bitterness toward immigrant Muslims living in the area. Sufi-oriented German Muslims spend the most time socializing with other German Muslims and keeping their distance from immigrant Muslims. zakat. as well as South America. I wonder which trash can they come out of. Look. and the United States. Some feel at home in these neighborhoods. not initiated members of the Sufi community. Denmark. the United States. Germany. choose to live in immigrant-majority. who converted to Shi‘i Islam thirty years ago when he was nineteen.

“But these are the poorest and most marginalized people in society. For non-Muslim Germans who carry a stereotype of how Muslims look.” To my initial surprise. quite unlike immigrant Muslim women in Germany. When I spoke to one of the leaders of the Potsdam group. At the fairs.” He added.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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The group organizes quarterly art fairs. “we do not charge artists for the stalls. who are much higher in the ethnic
. What can they be giving?” He answered me by saying. “because Prophet Muhammad said the giving hand is always stronger than the receiving hand. They play Indian music. it became clear to me that the group finds it quite important to differentiate itself from immigrant Muslims. they can at least give you a smile. being mistaken for a Turkish woman. loose.” I was astounded that an openly anti-capitalist Muslim would have such a negative view of his religious brothers. The women wear long. “we are not like those immigrant Muslims here who constantly say. We should learn to practice this as Muslims. Some time after converting to Islam. many came up with solutions that would prevent them from looking Turkish. While describing the effectiveness of the quarterly market they organized. I was told over and over that when they did so. or being taken for. I responded by saying. these Muslims probably appear more like members of an Indian-inspired religious group than like Muslims from the Middle East. Later I would see that such negative views of immigrant Muslims are not universal but are also not uncommon among German Muslims. members of the group look like hippies. a member told me how they try to teach people about true Islam at the fair.’ always begging from the state without contributing anything to this society. At first sight. ‘Give me. the group also has a stand decorated by batik clothes. there are no negative stereotypes about Islam either.” he continued. “For example. give me.” he said. and they will not even do that. colorful skirts and colorful headscarves wrapped in a way that leaves their ears and necks exposed. give me. and annoyed by. a great number of women develop the desire and the inner strength to wear a headscarf. They also added that because there are no immigrant Muslims in Potsdam. “Well. So. Turkish women than about living in the same neighborhood with them. if they do not have money. this Maribitun Muslim’s views on immigrant Muslims were not much different from those of my friend Aarika’s mother. Group members I talked to told me that because they are Germans. it is much easier for them to reach out to non-Muslim Germans and tell them about Islam. Many German convert women I met were more concerned about not looking like. they were most afraid of. One easy solution is to adopt the head-covering style of Arab women. who also lived in Potsdam. partly as a means to proselytize.” “So.

’ And I decided to do it like that from then on.’ And I said in despair. ‘Ulrike. where the scarf is wrapped around the head leaving the neck and sometimes part of the ears exposed. She told me how she embraced the African style through conflict with her parents. ‘Guests are here and I do not want another argument. Do you really have to wear this thing?’ At that moment I felt a little weak and I told her that I will do it like a turban and my mom said this is great! When my father saw me he had a big smile on his face and said. He even accused me of belonging to Al-Qaeda. but it took her ten years to adopt the headscarf. He said to his friends. I went to my parents’ house. Turkish women in Turkey and in Berlin wear their headscarves with a little plastic frame hidden in the front part of the headscarf. which holds it up almost like a baseball cap. ‘No. I found that this style is quite unacceptable for converts to Islam in Germany. My mom came in and said. Although this has been quite a fashion statement in Turkey in the last two decades or so. So now. A few months later it was my birthday. with my hijab of course. ‘You look like a Turkish woman. One style of head covering that is desirable to many Germans is the African style. although she doesn’t look like it. this is the Arabic style!’ We argued for weeks. She looks more like a Turk than a German. For my friend Ulrike. A few weeks later I went to my parents’ home again for my dad’s birthday. many Arabs from more privileged backgrounds come to Germany for university education. as I have already mentioned. I had told this to my mother. ‘This is much better. this subtle difference was not discernible to the uneducated eyes of the non-Muslim Germans but was more of a code to be read by stylish young Muslim women. Whereas the majority of Turkish immigrants came as untrained guest workers in the 1960s. ‘This lady sitting on the sofa is my daughter. Needless to say. Ulrike converted to Islam at age seventeen after she met the Moroccan-born man who would become her husband.182
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hierarchy in Berlin because of the different conditions in which Turks and Arabs came to Germany. they have gotten
. “After I started wearing the hijab. I noticed that young Turkish women who socialize in German-speaking Islamic settings also adopt this style rather than that of their mothers. I was crying in my room at my parents’. cover their hair in this way. The women of the Maribitun group. I don’t look like a Turkish woman. changing from the Arab style of head covering to the African style was what made her conversion to Islam acceptable to her parents. did you forget to unwrap this thing from your head?’ It was not a pleasant party. Most new German Muslims preferred the Arab style of wearing a bonnet inside and a headscarf outside which reveals the inner bonnet.’ Later my aunt walked up to me and said. ‘What is this?’ in outrage. He said. but my father didn’t know.

She enjoys sitting in upscale. who they believe give Islam a bad name. When he heard the word “reform. She says she also feels comfortable this way. who suffered from living in the low-income immigrant neighborhood. make sure to learn its language so you can communicate with the people there. ‘If you travel in a foreign country for more than fifteen days. since the African style does not hide her neck. and told me firmly. It is in this context that they sometimes feel more empowered than non-Muslim Germans to criticize immigrant Muslims for the way they practice Islam or participate in German life. Unless they wear the Arab-style long white dress and the prayer cap. Nevertheless. Miles. the conversation came around to the issue of reform in Islam. If they were good Muslims.” Amir straightened his posture. These clothes are not considered religiously necessary for new converts but more as festive mosque apparel. they certainly would have read the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions that say.” In the Islamophobic environment of Germany. when they out themselves as Muslims. and they also are frustrated with immigrant Muslims. He told me that. before immigrant
.’ So if these people were better Muslims. It is really shameful that these Turks have been here for more than forty years and so many of them cannot speak German. who have lower income and education levels. What we need is a reform of Muslims. and are marginalized and much hated by the rest of the society. no one recognizes her as Muslim with this style. He is now married to a Polish convert to Islam. and she even goes to the lakes during summer and swims with her entire outfit on and no one mistakes her for a Turk or treats her like a traitor who converted to Islam. As we sat down on the lush green carpets and started talking about the situation of Islam in Germany. Amir is the son of a Lebanese father and a German mother. all-German cafés.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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used to it and it is not a problem any more. also accused immigrant Muslims of giving Islam a bad name and inhibiting Islam’s spread in Germany. “We do not need reform in Islam. When I met them several months ago. they would have mastered German and be better integrated in society. It is much easier to be a male convert to Islam in Germany today—at least for now. giving information about Islam to German-speaking visitors. made his voice louder. with another scarf around her neck. He was raised by his Christian mother as a non-Muslim and converted to Islam several years ago. converted men also have to defend their position as Muslims. no one can recognize male converts as Muslims.” Now Ulrike wears her headscarf like an African wrap. German Muslims face the challenge of simultaneously defending Islam and differentiating themselves from immigrant Muslims. Amir and his wife were volunteers at a mosque in Berlin run by the Turkish government.

‘I am telling this to you as a Muslim. Leaders there tell me that lack of integration is their fault and they should do at least half of the sermons in German. unlike the Turks in Germany. and sophisticated people. skilled. be it visits to an ancestral homeland. This kind of evaluation is common among non-Muslim Germans as well. he thinks.184
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Muslims came to Germany. Even though converted German women would occasionally have complaints about local men harassing them or people not practicing Islam properly. many converts to Islam have an undecided relationship with the indigenous Muslims living in Muslim-majority lands.”
Relating to Muslims in Muslim-Majority Societies
Parallel to their ambivalent and sometimes surprisingly antagonistic relationship with immigrant Muslims. And Islam never becomes accessible to Germans. people hate Islam. they would often conclude that Middle Eastern and North African Muslims who have not migrated out of their homeland are better than those who have. or tourist travel to North Africa or the Middle East. I always tell them. even though it would benefit them so much if they converted too. “who came here for work. Islam used to have a very good reputation. Often. “There they are not all like the Anatolian peasants. But now. because Turks cut themselves off from society. do not practice Islam. and Izmir. most converts I met agree that Turks and Arabs living in Turkey and the Arab countries are much nicer—and simply better people—than the ones living in Germany. Ankara. in Istanbul. while others feel very content about living in Germany and believe they can experience Islam better where they are. Some of them idealize these populations and strongly desire to live in their countries. but everything is in Turkish.” they would say. I heard how especially Turks in Germany have lost their Islamic traditions and even their humanity.’ There is a Turkish Shi‘i mosque here. but in the end they never do. even if the criteria of evaluation are different. successfully employed Turk who grew up in Turkey would prompt well-traveled Germans to share their observation that. a spouse’s homeland. not the good
. He said to me: “Turks do not learn German because they do not want to be part of this society. You should learn German. both immigrant and converted Muslims compared their impressions from visits to Muslim-majority countries. “Here we got the bad Turks. Regardless of whether they want to live in Germany or in the Middle East. to Saudi Arabia for pilgrimage. there are many smart. My being an educated.” Several times I was bluntly told. In after-lecture tea gatherings in the mosques. and are simply not good citizens.

For example. Other converts had no fantasies about living in Muslim lands. Sometimes. I am not sure if this is such a good idea. either by alleviating their material suffering or by making them better Muslims—and sometimes both at the same time. She had lived in the U. She observed that it would be very easy to live as a practicing Muslim in both countries.S. She liked the easygoing lifestyle in both places. I have a friend who recently moved to Jidda with her husband. I want to live here as a Muslim. there you can hear the call to prayer. people would go back and forth between two images. said to me. a twenty-five-year-old convert to Islam.” Whereas non-Muslim Germans would often admire Turkish artists. but she preferred Canada for its social rights. she never liked Germany or the German language. shared how this perspective affects the lives of converts. expressed a wish to go to Africa and fight against female genital cutting among Muslims there. converted Germans would admire the non-diasporic Muslims for their commitment to Islam. “I am proud to be a German. My friend Ada. and she would be able to eat at Taco Bell and Cinnabon.” When I asked her if she ever longs to live in a Muslim-majority country. her favorite restaurants. you can even buy alcohol there. and everything. the East German with the little boy and charred car. She says Jidda is too westernized. She said. A counter version of this idealized vision of Muslims in the Middle East exists simultaneously. and businessmen for their Western outlook and their social competency in Western bourgeois ways. Of course. “German sisters often want to leave Germany for their husbands’ countries. The same individuals who praised Middle Easterners would later criticize them for not practicing Islam correctly or for having been spoiled by Western influences. intellectuals.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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ones like you. Like many other Germans I met. Verena.” Ada wanted to live in Canada or the U. converted or not. Irma was interested in foreign cultures and also in human suffering
. go around in your hijab comfortably. Irma. but I want it to be Germany!” Another strong tendency I observed was that of new German Muslims desiring to help and transform Muslim societies. she answered with a big smile on her face: “I of course would love to live in a Muslim-majority country. for one year as an exchange student and then in Canada for a year with her Bosnian boyfriend. Now they will move to Mecca. I love this country. and hospitality. generosity.S. who converted at seventeen after she visited a mosque during an open house with a friend. You can even buy alcohol in Saudi Arabia. I am proud that it has such a great economy and everyone wants to immigrate here. But now Western civilization is everywhere.

as Western women. Also.186
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long before she encountered Islam through a Tunisian asylum seeker she met while she was a high school student. My friend Ada blamed her boyfriend’s family for the failure of their relationship. She decided to embrace Islam and marry her Tunisian friend. although not all. she told me. she did not fit the ideal picture his mother had for a daughter in-law. since most devout born-Muslim women in Germany have close ties with their families. as she saw how devastating life could be when she lived in a small economically depressed Moldovan town. regardless of their religion. converts meet Islam in the first place through romantic relationships with a born Muslim who is either an immigrant in Europe or a local in a popular tourist destination abroad. If she cannot go to Africa. or to work as doctors serving women in Afghanistan. A good number of these relationships fall apart after the German partner converts to Islam and is disappointed to find that the born-Muslim partner is not willing to reorganize his life around Islamic principles. most converts to mainstream Islam want to marry born Muslims. on the other hand. She told me that once she graduates from college she would like to help Muslims around the world. The boyfriend was the only son in the family. These are the relationships that survive. Other converted women I met also expressed a desire to help orphans in Palestine or women traders in Muslim Africa. Even when they have papers. There are also cases where born Muslims are inspired by a converted lover or partner and find Islam for themselves. who are less willing to accept German men. survivors of the failed relationships still desire born Muslims as spouses. much more than any Bosnian
. Ada told me she did everything for the family. have an extremely difficult time finding born-Muslim wives. it is simply more acceptable for immigrant Muslim men to be romantically involved with German women. Many. since there are many immigrant Muslim men without papers who urgently need to make their residence legal by marrying a German citizen. Converted German men. Despite their original disappointment.
Desiring Born Muslims
Unless they are followers of a Sufi tradition. she would like to go to Afghanistan and help women who are suffering under the Taliban and have to wear burkas. they believe they are better equipped to eliminate practices that give Islam a bad name. It is somewhat easier for converted women to find a born-Muslim husband. Because Ada was much older than he. They find themselves in the best position to determine what non-Islamic traditions are being used to exploit women in the name of Islam.

but I have seen the worst. and in the end. Besides. isn’t she?” Eventually. their husbands treat them terribly. “Well. they are highly motivated to marry German citizens in order to continue the new lives they establish for themselves. They think that they will know Islam better. these so-called Muslim husbands just go ahead and divorce them. “Don’t get me wrong. I am not ugly or stupid.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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bride would do. “But of course those Muslims who grow up with it know much less about Islam. and converted to Islam. wore conservative clothes. “Maybe some of them are good brothers. she is still German. the mother of the boyfriend said. They will say. she was actively looking for a husband. Also.’ But they never want you to marry their sons. And I definitely do not want to marry someone without papers again. Later she married an Arab immigrant.” One day Ada and I were sitting in a small mosque in Berlin. how wonderful. These German men just want to be integrated. listening to a long and rather uninspired German-language lecture about how to prepare a dead
. The marriage did not last long. Believe me. she doesn’t know Arabic herself. She said.” She realizes that such men are readily available. They do not want you in their family. their families are not there to arrange their marriages. But they were too old. Otherwise. she will teach him Arabic. But most men who propose to me need papers [to stay in Germany]. Even after she converted. German men want to marry Arab or Turkish women. Men think she will give them a big Muslim family. ‘mashallah. when they get the papers. And after the marriage. it feels like you are marrying someone who lacks something.” She continued. Of course people want to marry me. I cannot marry someone without love. many of these marriages are terrible.” Despite her experience. Many brothers from Morocco and Tunisia marry German sisters here who know nothing about wedding contracts. They do not even want a big wedding. adding.” Then she challenged what she had just said. but she was quite pessimistic about her prospects. she said. I know this very well because that is what happened to me last year. She explained to me that “all Turks and Arabs will be nice to you when they learn that you are a convert. Ada has learned to be cautious about such people. If she is Arab. If you marry a convert. When I met her. served them food. Sisters do not ask for anything at the beginning. When I asked her if she would consider marrying a German Muslim man. Because they travel to Germany alone. and it was not a good experience for Ada. She cleaned the house. “I had offers from German Muslims as well. Ada realized she would not be able to persuade the boyfriend to be with her despite his mother and broke up with him. Ada still wants to marry a born Muslim.

Gilman argues that both positions are “just as laden with the desire to provide a form of control over the image of that construct category of the ‘Jews’” (2006: 228). After a while I noticed that Ada kept glancing at the section where men sit and then lowered her eyes. Sander Gilman (2006) observes that “the line between ‘anti-’ and ‘philo-Semitic’ attitudes towards the Jews is always blurred” (2006: 226). she said. I asked her what had happened. Ada looked very disappointed. For example. “Well. I suggest that this complex emerges often after ethnic Germans convert to Islam only to realize that they must face unexpectedly high levels of stigma because they are associated with the country’s much-hated and feared born Muslims. Scholars such as Olivier Roy (2004) and Wohlrab-Sahr (1999) argue that it is often ethnic
.188
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body for burial. she thinks. He was strategically located in one of the few spots where men can see women through the screen separating the men’s and women’s sections of the mosque.” If this had been true. indicating that the man was lacking education and was probably a lower-class. I noticed an olive-skinned. you shouldn’t be checking out women across the room and giving them sexy looks in the first place. “But of course if you fear God. he claims. recently arrived immigrant. blushing. the imam appeared on the women’s side with a written note from the man. In Multiculturalism and the Jews. About ten minutes later. but anti-Semites will use the same stereotype to argue that Jews are cunning. I was impressed by that. After reading the note. When I asked her what about him had originally captured her attention. After the lecture. “I would never have become a Muslim if I had met Muslims before I met Islam. Ada decided not to contact him. When I turned to see what she was looking at. philo-Semites will compliment Jews for their intelligence. The case of German Muslims takes Gilman’s discussion one step further. Ada turned this article’s title. he was dressed in this fundamentally Islamic way. black-haired man with a white Saudi jalabiyya. it would be easier now for her to feel more comfortable in her faith.” Despite her search for a born-Muslim man. demonstrating that dislike and affection for a minority population can be merged in the viewpoints of a single group of people. “I sometimes wish I knew about Islam before I knew Muslims. and she told me the note was full of grammar mistakes. and these sentiments are often mirror images of each other.” Then she sarcastically added. Ada asked the mosque’s imam about the man.” around and said. One can expand this discussion to the relationship between phobic and philic sentiments attributed to any feared or marginalized group and certainly to attitudes toward Muslims in Europe. He was staring in our direction.

contrary to this argument. Even if they could have imagined it intellectually. Moreover. come from solidly middle-class families and are well educated. many found it very difficult to face in a real. I would argue that only after they convert to Islam do ethnic European Muslims find themselves in a marginal position. felt very uncomfortable when they realized that they were being treated as stigmatized immigrants.” During my research.11 It seems that many had little reason to protest. and the new role attributed to Islam in the civilizational discourse of a post–Cold War. They assured me that Germans were more likely to listen to them and open their hearts to Islam because. many new Muslims. and who are simply oppressed women. they looked German and did not have an accent. in the increasingly racialized conceptualization of Islam that now prevails in contemporary Germany and in Europe generally. especially women. to leave Islam untainted by a rising cultural racism. some German Muslims draw heavily on the Islamophobic discourses of German society. although certainly not all. The borders they cross are less porous. Being an ethnic German convert to Islam is not an easy way of being in contemporary Germany.German Converts to Islam and Immigrant Muslims
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Europeans who already feel marginalized by society who turn to Islam as a way of rebelling against the society they live in. ironically. most converts I met had no political aims but concentrated instead on their spiritual progress along the new path they had taken. Yet. Hence. They pointed out to me that suddenly they were treated as individuals who do not have sufficient mental or linguistic capabilities. some German converts feel the need to disassociate themselves from born Muslims in the name of idealizing Islam. the space that is left for people who want to be both German and Muslim is very small. post-9/11 world. and they are seen as dangerous in the new Europe. While practicing and acting on their Islamophilia. As the German Muslim woman I quoted at the beginning of this piece told me. converts to Islam have an ambivalent relationship to immigrant Muslims and to “Islamic practices” as they are defined and redefined in relation to immigrants. Roy calls these people “protest converts” (2004: 317). one they never could have imagined for themselves before. day-to-day existence. unlike Turks or Arabs. Because of the significantly lower status of Muslim immigrants in a highly xenophobic country. I found that a good portion of new German Muslims. both to defend their difficult position and. especially once they had put on the Islamic headscarf. Although Islam is almost always introduced to ethnic Germans through intimate personal connections with born Muslims and brings a greater number of born Muslims into the converts’ lives.
. and Wohlrab-Sahr describes their choice as “symbolic battle.

the intensity of negative reactions they faced after converting to Islam. Roald (2004) argues that Muslim converts play an important bridge role in Scandinavian countries as well. Calif. 2003. 264) refers to a similar statement frequently made by new Muslims in Sweden. Yet they are fewer in number than Turks. Van Nieuwkerk (2004) makes the same observation for women Dutch converts to Islam.
. 4. As the German Muslim community grows. After World War II. Roald (2004) argues that in Sweden women converts. however. In that sense. is not the case in the United Kingdom. 6. Although they may exist. she argues. Van Nieuwkerk (2004) makes the same observation about Dutch women converts. Roald (2004. is a recent phenomenon. How these practices came to be defined as essentially Islamic at the turn of the millennium is the topic of another paper. 8.190
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Notes
1. and found themselves unprepared for. East Germany received immigrants from other socialist countries such as Vietnam and Angola. more Germans embrace Islam with German Muslims as intermediaries. Formations of the Secular: Christianity. a close Muslim contact often is necessary for Swedes to give Islam serious thought.: Stanford University Press. Modernity. are accused of being traitors to society. Talal. Stanford. I believe. Islam.
Works Cited
Asad. The shift of focus from men to women in conceptualizing the Islamic threat in Europe. 2. 3. 11. 7. 5. I never met a new Muslim who embraced Islam without any Muslim intermediaries. Roald (2004) argues that because Islam is perceived so negatively in Sweden. This. Roald (2006) emphasizes the importance of the growth of the Swedish Muslim population in identifying Swedish converts as Swedish and Muslim. contact with Muslims is not the cause of conversion but a necessary first condition. Jeff Jurgens (2005) notes that Berliners rarely travel outside their neighborhoods. 9. 10. He describes how members of the Turkish-German soccer team he was a playing with became uncomfortable when they had to travel to other parts of the city and country for tournaments. not men. In her book Becoming Muslim Anna Mansson (2002) also talks about how women converts to Islam in the United States and Sweden were shocked by. Other research with converts in Sweden (Roald 2004) and Britain (Köse 1996) has found that an overwhelming majority of Europeans convert to Islam through personal contact with born Muslims. where immigrant Muslims are less segregated in society and are fluent in English.

Hispanic awareness month. Do these people ever laugh? The simplistic idea that Muslims “hate us” has simultaneously produced rigid stereotypes and a countering desire to discover what those stereotypes deny: among other things. Asian awareness month. —Zarqa Nawaz. comedian and member of the Axis of Evil comedy troupe [Little Mosque] is appealing because it shows Muslims being normal. Black history month. If someone has a sense of humor. The degree to which the cartoons were actually funny or offensive. a Muslim sense of humor. The Danish cartoon crisis shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the Muslim relationship to humor. is a complicated 195
. not just cold FBI agents coming out to arrest people. in reasoning like this. It humanizes Muslims. then he is just like us: likable. What do we get? We get orange alert! —Dean Obeidallah. I want the broader society to look at us as normal. and for what reasons. —Gwen Hubbard. They get a whole month that celebrates their heritage. humor usually stands for humanity. creator of the TV series Little Mosque on the Prairie [By hosting Muslim comedy] we want to demystify the FBI and show people that we are human. with the same issues and concerns as anyone else. chief recruiter for the FBI’s National Recruiting/Testing Office
The association of Muslims with terrorism after 9/11 has prompted a search for the “comic” side of being Muslim. Needless to say.8
Muslim Ethnic Comedy: Inversions of Islamophobia
Mucahit Bilici
I see other minorities and I am jealous. to whom.

especially in liberal societies where Muslims have the relative comfort to crack jokes about themselves and their non-Muslim compatriots. some Western commentators saw in the Danish cartoon affair a Muslim intolerance of humor.
. humor was not the only issue at stake. A journey from fear to laughter. there has been an upsurge in ethnic comedy by Muslims in America. Obviously. they practice simultaneously the two ways of seeing things. however. They attract young Muslim audiences but also. Individuals like Azhar Usman or Ahmed Ahmed and groups such as Allah Made Me Funny and Axis of Evil are appearing onstage with comic routines.” says Zarqa Nawaz.” Not only is its audience growing. a tragedy that triggered widespread Islamophobia in American society seems also to have opened the field for Muslim comedy. yet by standing there he becomes a sort of stitch that holds together the two sides of the cultural rift. “The time is right. which they equated with cultural inferiority.
Muslim Comedy: “The time is right”
Muslim comedy is an emerging “market. Muslim ethnic comedy in the United States thus becomes a series of inversions played out against a background of Islamophobia. This is best illustrated in their ability to go back and forth between accented and normal speech. Increasing curiosity about Muslims and their (supposed lack of) humor has created a surprising demand for Muslim ethnic comedy. but it is also a new career field for Muslim cultural entrepreneurs. Paradoxically.” These cultural entrepreneurs claim knowledge of both worlds: ethnic and mainstream. This essay explores the intricate relationship between Islamophobia and Muslim ethnic comedy and argues that both phobic and philic sentiments arise from a loss of common sense. As arbiters of a cultural encounter and as field guides to a contact zone. non-Muslim ones. a popular Canadian sitcom. where a person belongs to both worlds and neither. Rather predictably. these stand-up comedians are situated in a unique position. This kind of shortsightedness has a way of conjuring its opposite.196
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subject I will not explore here. increasingly. The comic stands uneasily on the fault line. the Muslim producer of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Able to “leap” from one side to the other. Since the tragic events of 9/11. it aims to bridge the divide that separates Muslims from the rest of American society by reaffirming both sides’ common humanity. This position is often a tragic one. mostly secondgeneration young people and converts. “The marketplace has never been this curious about Muslims.

He is s-o-o hairy. The security . [slightly hysterical voice] “Oh my God! I’m gonna die. “So where are you from . Usman. and his jokes about the airport experience are the epitome of today’s emergent Muslim comedy. founded the troupe Allah Made Me Funny. They are perhaps the only beneficiaries of the negative charisma associated with being Muslim. please?” “We’ll need to do an extra security check. The moment I have to walk into the airport. I love you.” “Can I see your ID. The members of comedy troupes such as Allah Made Me Funny and Axis of Evil were comedians. but not exclusively. [desperate whisper into cell phone] Honey. but it did take on a distinctive form and quality after it. Writing for George Lopez and Darrell Hammond. but they were not “American Muslim comedians. together with Preacher Moss.
My least favorite thing about being a comedian is all the traveling. Like every other ethnic group. he lost his white status and became Arab.
Fear and Laughter at the Airport
Let us look at the most prominent Muslim comedian in the United States: Azhar Usman. Heads turn simultaneously. Muslim comics thus represent the experience of most Muslims. Preacher Moss was producing primarily. who. African American humor. People are shocked.” Even worse is the moment I have to get onto the plane. [As though speaking into a walkie-talkie] “We got a Mohammad at 4 o’clock. That’s right. he says. Similarly. is the very model of a post-9/11 Muslim stand-up comedian. . Islamophobia is what has made Muslim comedy a phenomenon of our times. . That’s right. he was a mainstream comedian with an African American edge. But they were completely obscure from the point of view of the larger society. The discrimination. their own comedians. After 9/11. but this was not the primary framework defining his work. prejudices. As an individual. but in an inverted way. They lacked both common language with and a reputation among mainstream audiences. ?” And then they suddenly see me. September 11 is a turning point in the history of American Muslim ethnicity as well as in the history of American Muslim comedy. the various Muslim communities had their internal humor. he was Muslim.” They were either obscure ethnic comedians or generic mainstream ones. . Dean Obeidallah of Axis of Evil repeatedly says that before 9/11 he was a white guy doing generic comedy.Muslim Ethnic Comedy
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Muslim comedy did not begin with 9/11. For example. They are in the middle of a conversation. before his Allah Made Me Funny days. .”
. and stereotypes from which other Muslims suffer are a godsend for the Muslim comedian.

and so on) been treated equally suddenly become suspect. I don’t get it. Remember when you got up to go to bathroom? I was gonna stab you. this is totally not the disguise I would be in [pirouetting his large. When a Muslim like Azhar Usman gets onto the plane. I thought you were gonna kill us. What if he is a terrorist? What if he hijacks the plane? What if he is only pretending to be normal? All these questions that airport authorities ask citizens to consider transform the Muslim passenger in the eyes of his fellow travelers into a source of unpredictability and danger. man. Ha ha. they suddenly feel their protected status begin to evaporate. Even those Muslims who do not consider themselves particularly profiled or discriminated against in everyday life suddenly begin to feel uneasy. At the internal borders of the nation. Despite official efforts to present searches at the airports as random. they are just looking over smiling.
This routine provides a perfect illustration of the Muslim airport experience. At the airport. . They are at once ethnic and national.198
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[Here Azhar takes a break from the drama and complains to his audience:] I don’t really understand why these people are so scared of me. The anxiety ends only when the plane lands. Ha haa ha. Jokes about aviation thus have a remarkable degree of transparency and universality. those who have so far (in the city. . It doesn’t exactly slip me under the radar. where the negative charisma of being Muslim assumes full transparency. Danger is imminent. once the plane safely lands. bearded self around the stage]. People are almost thankful to the Muslim passenger for not doing what they feared he might. Here Muslim otherness is revealed in the most conspicuous way. Flying-while-Muslim thus becomes an extremely public event. Strip search and other security rites of passage through the border show them the hard edge of the nation. A crucial point here is that the airport is where Muslim experience and American mainstream experience meet. [He concludes his flight story with exaggerated relief:] Of course. comedians like Dean Obeidallah skeptically ask their Muslim audiences: “Are you selected for random search even when you are dropping a friend at the airport?” The fear a Muslim inspires is associated with the unpredictability of his behavior. Ha ha. Sorry about that. Muslims and non-Muslims alike can understand and laugh at airport and airplane jokes. Ha ha. at the ticket counter. I am waiting for one real honest passenger to come up to me at the end of the flight . These jokes represent the comic surface where Muslim and American perspectives intersect most
.” That’s what it feels like these days. He says. Just think about it: if I were the crazy Muslim planning to hijack the plane. “Excuse me sir. faces fall. particular and universal.

Apparently that puts us in the fourth place behind blacks. Right after 9/11. A minority group has an otherness that can seem indelible as long as the group makes some effort to maintain its distinct identity. I read a statistic on CBS. Middle Eastern people and Muslims went up over 1. Jokes about the airport experience thus constitute a significant portion of the repertoire of Muslim comedians today. ‘So tell us a joke. “Do you know who the air marshal is on the plane? The guy reading People magazine upside down while keeping an eye on me. As he puts it:
It is a bad time to be from the Middle East.” This insecurity—a mismatch between habitus and habitat.”
Otherness: Scary and Funny
The appearance and potential disappearance of ethnic comedy is linked to the location of the ethnic group in relation to the majority society. I just graduated from flight school. gays.Muslim Ethnic Comedy
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“dangerously” and with full intelligibility. The group also put out a DVD in 2007 which features Maz Jobrani. ‘Well. In this sense.’ And I go. both fear and laughter are reactions to otherness. to use Bourdieu’s (1977) terms—produces cultural discord and can lead to tragic and comic outcomes.
FBI’s Most Wanted: Terrorist and Comedian
The Axis of Evil comedy tour started in November 2005 and gained national recognition with an appearance on Comedy Central on March 10. Anxiety about identity preservation and the power differential with the majority group can combine to create a sense of “insecurity. Aron Kader. Ahmed Ahmed.000%. Ahmed Ahmed is an Egyptian American who also had an acting career in Hollywood.com. Dissatisfied with the parts available to Middle Eastern actors. You guys know this? We are still in the fourth place. Ahmed’s routine typically revolves around the absurdities of the security check at the airport. Ahmed looks around the plane. hate crimes against Arabs. He claims that his name matches one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists.
. he decided to become a stand-up comedian after 9/11. and guest member Dean Obeidallah. So each time he goes to the airport.’” Once on board. 2007. So what do we have to do to be number one in something?
Ahmed Ahmed notes that often people don’t believe that he is a comedian— especially when it’s the airport security staff asking him what he does for a living. and Jews. he has to go through extra security checks. “They always say.

a deroutinization—a certain degree of alienation from common sense. is more likely to see incongruities between the two worldviews and so finds more to laugh at. The group with the double vision. “I see this guy.’” Comic vision reveals a reality different from commonsense reality. Minorities—or in our case. Berger 1997: xvii). Here. Simmel’s
. however. and himself the local one” (Aristotle 1987: 45). The majority knows only its own view of the world. Other realities. the minority. and from its vantage point the minority may look funny. and its own. particular view. Dazed by the barrage of announcements warning travelers to “report suspicious individuals. in his Poetics. ‘You’re looking in a mirror. that “the comic poet should assign his characters their ancestral dialect. I call the security guy over and he says. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1975) has rightly called humor a “play upon forms. He looks shady. commonsense reality is objective in that it is shared by multiple social actors and is thoroughly sedimented in language and everyday symbolic structures.” he finds himself looking over at a corner of the waiting area. then. He critiques and destabilizes the existing “common sense” for its failure to see reality. Phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz distinguishes between commonsense reality (“the paramount reality of the everyday life”) and other realities (“finite provinces of meaning”) (Schutz 1962: 207). No wonder. that people who experience “shocks” (from accidents to earthquakes) are prone to laughter (Brottman 2004: 76). The ethnic comedian basically plays on stereotypes. Discrimination or racism and ethnic comedy are two sides of the same coin. But the minority has access to two visions: the majority vision. remain subjective and partial. It is no wonder that many minority groups are historically famous for their humor. a shared vision.” A form that looks like unassailable truth in the majority view may turn to a tottering fiction in the eyes of the minority. immigrant communities—can laugh both at the majority’s taken-for-granted idiosyncrasies and at the majority’s view of the minority. Those who are in a position to see things differently are more likely to generate humor. Behind the large body of Jewish humor lies the Jewish experience of marginality (Rappoport 2005: 66. The comic presents an alternative reality that transcends the reality of the ordinary and helps us see things from a certain distance. which it is obligated to cultivate in order to “fit in”. It comes as no surprise that Aristotle declares. What is crucial here is the relationship between vision and distance. One of Azhar Usman’s airport jokes reflects the discordant vision imposed on Muslims.200
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They represent two directions of destabilization and alienation from everyday rationality. which they find scarily wrong or amusingly incorrect. sir. Common sense here refers to a social consensus. In both cases there is a breakdown—or more precisely.

Similarly. Superiority theory acknowledges both the power differential and the relation between two parties. I’ve been sending him Hanukkah cards for the past ten years. they are all doctors.” observes Azhar Usman.’” “Any Syrians in the audience?” Usman often asks.” he immediately adds. propounded by Plato. Schopenhauer describes laughter as happen-
. ‘Hey.” he mentions in his routine. Preacher Moss is particularly well placed to comment on community divisions. He’s outed. For example. According to this approach. unexpected acts and conditions. you have three children. argues that “nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees” (Morreal 1983: 16). we laugh at our inferiors. “I know you’re thinking: ‘Thank God it’s not my sister!’”
Theories of the Comic
As a uniquely human phenomenon. usually to applause from the audience. For our purposes here. ‘Mashaallah. “We have conference after conference about what? ‘Muslim participation in the political process. “You know. We need Muslim politicians and journalists. I’m married to an Indian sister. If superiority theory is a political explanation of the comic.’ At every one a Desi uncle stands up and says: ‘We need more Muslims in politics. Then one year he goes to the holiday party with his wife. ‘I thought he was Jewish.’ one of his co-workers says. Muslim comedians find themselves on a borderline where they can criticize both the majority and their own minority communities. humor has been an object of curiosity for philosophers. ‘Oh my God. who wears hijab. blue eyes: totally blends into corporate America. the stranger. Laughter is seen as a means of expressing superiority over other people. Such laughter can be aggressive and is certainly self-celebratory. “You know.’” As an African American Muslim. I am so proud of them—even though one of them had to go to the Caribbean to get a degree. It sees humor as an outcome of inconsistent. the main insight of the superiority theory of humor is the idea of relationality. represents this ability to be both near and far and to be able to stay attached to the mainstream vision and withdraw back to the ethnic vision (Simmel 1971: 143–48). Pascal.Muslim Ethnic Comedy
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famous social type.’ Then you ask him. Among the oldest accounts of why we laugh is the theory of superiority. “All those people out there clapping. what do they do?’ He says. “We are not a politically active community. incongruity theory provides a rather cultural one. one of the early proponents of this view. I have a Syrian friend. and later Hobbes. Aristotle. uncle. Blond hair.

. In this reversal of symbolic order. Relief theory emphasizes the cathartic release from repression: in Aristotelian terms. This violence cries out for refutation or rectification.. As Morreal puts it. the minority is released from social classifications (e. resulting in partial lifting of repression and an economic expenditure of psychic energy” (quoted in Bergmann 1999: 3). what is comedy but a comic deconstruction? Another prominent theory of humor is called the relief theory. stereotypes). Mary Douglas (1975) and Victor Turner (1969). Comedy.g.202
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ing in situations marked by “the sudden perception of incongruity between a concept and things themselves” (Schopenhauer 1966: 91). summarizing Schopenhauer’s perspective. an everyday version of the destruction of metaphysics (what Derrida [1998] calls deconstruction) takes place. “What causes laughter is a mismatch between conceptual understanding and perception” (Morreal 1983: 18). Freud explores the psychic cost of civilization for individuals. an anti-structure imagined as an alternative structure. and the majority is given the opportunity to feel like a minority (Douglas 1975: 103. (And isn’t this the perfect definition of a stereotype?) All concepts do violence to the uniqueness of the things they claim to represent: this is a problem intrinsic to any abstraction (Nietzsche 2006: 117. In Civilization and Its Discontents. After all. albeit temporarily. a “purification” of emotions. one may argue. One way to cure it is through comic treatment. Berger 1997: 72). two prominent cultural anthropologists working within the Durkheimian tradition. Comedy is an anti-rite presented in a ritual. Simmel 1950: 63). The majority’s vision (structure) is temporarily and imaginarily relegated to the status of anti-structure. Here a concept is general and lumps together unique and particular things as if they were identical instantiations of that concept. In this accidental encounter between reality or experience (minority vision) and the abstract metaphysics of stereotypes (majority vision). while the minority’s vision (anti-structure) is elevated in its place. they claim. He identifies the overwhelming power and expansion of the reality principle over the pleasure principle as the main cause for the unhappiness of modern man (Freud 1961: 22). In his discussion of jokes. Laughter. rightly point to the margins and to liminality as the location of humor. Freud argues that the “manifest content of dreams and jokes yield pleasure through their disguised expression of unconscious wishes. turns the world upside down by showing the audience the view from the other side. We revert to the pleasure principle. In comedy the relationship is reversed. Freud also links jokes to the unconscious and draws attention to the economy of psychic energy in the repression of emotions (the id) by the superego. is a product of the sudden recognition of this very gap.

familiar. For once he feels comfortable in his exotic outfit and joins his daughter in playful celebration of Halloween. exotic has become the normal. . Just so. For a brief time the abnormal. the Greek god of revelry and excess who violates all ordinary boundaries. Mikhail Bakhtin famously observed that in carnivals and other rites of passage. Brottman 2004: 150. For Nietzsche. It is a peculiar point of view relative to the world. Both comedy and tragedy originated in the cult of Dionysus. emotions. but only if he goes with her. . is the time and place where the world is turned upside down. He feels relieved.Muslim Ethnic Comedy
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The idea of a reversal of symbolic order is of crucial importance for understanding the structural dimensions of ethnic comedy. So the little girl in her costume sets out with her bearded father in the religiously conservative Pakistani dress that he wears every day. He almost reverts to the unselfconscious pleasures of childhood. according to Bakhtin. comic vision does indeed thrive on the discrepancies and interplay of two forces. He finally decides to let her go. This is why comedy is perceived as a threat to the established order—and Plato in his Republic famously calls for the banishment of poets (i. and laughter.
. Berger 1997: 21). the ordinary world is turned upside down (Bakhtin 1968. Halloween becomes Halal-oween.e. comedians and tragedians) from the ideal city.
Baber at the Bakhtinian Carnival
One episode of Little Mosque focuses on Baber. Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter” (Bakhtin 1968: 20). it temporarily releases Baber from the tension of being his usual. . and seriousness and the latter with anti-structure. . But the neighborhood children greet him with shouts of “Great costume!” They think he’s dressed up as Osama bin Laden.. strange self. the festivity that Baber had thought was foreign to his culture and potentially harmful for his children suddenly turns around and embraces him: by cultural accident. a protective father who is reluctant to let his daughter dress up and go trick-or-treating at Halloween. In a carnivalesque moment. these two forces were the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. . horsing around with the other kids and competing to see who can get the most candy. Laughter is therefore “one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world as a whole. The former is associated with structure. . an awkward-looking immigrant guy becomes a local dressed strangely for Halloween. rationality. The carnival. Often perceived as a reversal of the relationship between the rational and the irrational. This Dionysian element in the Greek tradition is continued by the Roman festival of Saturnalia (Nietzsche 2006: 122) and extends into the present day in the many versions of Carnival.

2007). They purify the soul and restore the balance of reason (Aristotle 1987: 45). It is as if he sinks below the level of commonsense rationality through fear (What is this Halloween. she said “[Little Mosque] is appealing because it shows Muslims being normal. anyway? Can my daughter join in this pagan festival and still be a good Muslim?). Thousands of Muslims who attended the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) in south Chicago in 2007 came across an FBI booth in the bazaar section of the convention. This is the therapeutic function of comedy (and tragedy) that Aristotle argued for in his Poetics. The FBI’s rationale for hosting Muslim comedians is strikingly similar to Muslims’ own approach to comedy.IslamOnline. one emotion has to be undone by another emotion. the chief recruiter for the agency. A bit of laughter can undo your fears and bring you back into the fold of rationality. When Zarqa Nawaz. or love) share the same world of emotions. the creator of the television series Little Mosque on the Prairie. “Today’s FBI: It’s for You. Gwen Hubbard. the FBI recently initiated an outreach program targeting Muslims.net. Once the balance is lost. said: “We want to demystify the FBI and show people that we are human. not just cold FBI agents coming out to arrest people” (www. The signs at the booth read.C.” Efforts to build bridges with the Muslim community in general and Arabs in particular were taken to another level when the FBI sponsored a performance by Axis of Evil at an American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) convention in Washington. D. This process of undoing the fall from reason requires catharsis (purification. the philosopher argues. In response to this problem. have a cathartic effect. There is a reason for that: while fear and reason belong to different spheres. fear and laughter (or pity. it is much easier to go from fear to laughter than back to reason. Both tragedy and comedy. In an interview with Reuters explaining the rationale behind the FBI’s use of ethnic comedians to reach out to suspicious Arabs and Muslims. purging of negative emotions). gave a talk in Detroit. June 14. The phobic and philic destinations mark the two extremes toward which he finds himself thrown. What is common to both conditions is their distance or alienation from reason/normality. It hu-
. To restore reason.
The FBI and Muslim Comedy
Widespread public Islamophobia and the government crackdown on Muslim institutions and individuals have deepened the alienation of Muslims from security agencies such as the FBI. and then rises above it through laughter.204
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In this segment we see Baber oscillating between fear and laughter.

A terrorist masquerading as a citizen versus a citizen masquerading as a terrorist. Those whose reality is already distorted because of stereotypes resort to humor to rectify and reassert their own sense of what is real. One sees a series of inversions in the practice of Muslim ethnic comedy. A gap has appeared between appearance and reality. the Muslim (an oddity in American life) becomes funny when he appears “ordinary.” The gulf opened between the two sides by the tragic events of 9/11 and subsequent arrests and surveillance of Muslims has disrupted the balance of rationality and citizenship. I want the broader society to look at us as normal. Let us start with some rather trivial ones. From each side. “The comic invades and subverts the taken-for-granted structures of social life” (Berger 1997: 91). this reversal of symbolic structure is not itself irreversible. What if they are terrorists pretending to be decent citizens? What if they are after us no matter what decent citizens we are? Both sides harbor (ungrounded?) fears when it comes to the other. a sense that is common to both). they have to go through laughter. It is as though Muslim comics engage in a game of cultural peekaboo by transmuting phobic suspicions into surprised exclamations of “Oh. making them explicit. These are the FBI’s bugbears and the butt of the Muslim comedian’s jokes. Laughter allows each to see the world through the eyes of the other. Because the everyday world has become extraordinary. To pull each other out of fear back into the sphere of rationality (common sense. he is one of us after all. humor allows for a distortion of commonsense reality. with the same issues and concerns as anyone else. Since they no longer share a common view of the world. Of course. Muslim actors like Jobrani who found no roles in Hollywood but those of terrorists switched to stand-up comedy—where they now mock the very roles they once played. he is engaged in a symbolic reversal of the wiretapping and surveillance of Muslims by the FBI. their redemption is possible only through putting themselves in each other’s shoes.Muslim Ethnic Comedy
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manizes Muslims.”
The Inverted World of Muslim Comedy
Comedy constructs a counter-world to the world of ordinary life. When Maz Jobrani of Axis of Evil picks up a digital video camera at the ADC convention and starts to record the FBI agents sitting around the table close to the stage. one can easily become suspicious of the other. That is precisely what the Muslim comic does: he undermines the two sides’ discordant visions by playing on them.” In other words. Muslims tend to think that shows like Little Mosque are bastions of Islamophilia
.

An interesting outcome of the securitization of society is the ban on jokes at the airport. by the TSA (Transportation Security Agency). According to a statement released on March 11. As entry and exit points to the nation. Axis of Evil’s famous performance on Comedy Central is the best example: they perform on a stage festooned with nuclear warning signs and each comedian is frisked by a toughlooking female security screener in full TSA regalia as he steps onto the stage. They are not the only ones to use this gimmick. airports provide us a unique perspective on questions of sovereignty and identity. Airports are internal borders.206
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in a sea of hostile media. 2004. In one of his performances with comedian Rabbi Bob Alper. one of the central characters.” About airport security and full body searches she notes wryly: “I was kind of hoping to save that for the honeymoon. she is feeling “slutty. An equally interesting development is the attempt on the part of Muslim ethnic comedians to turn the stage into a symbolic airport space. They are also symptomatic of the Dionysian continuum of fear and laughter. who normally does not wear hijab. she jokes. This particular ban makes airports a unique part of the national space. (The two comedians have toured together across the country. The demands of comedy may even force performers to raise their “Muslim quotient. Sometimes she wears a slightly less full hijab—if. an Iranian American comedian from Boston.” Tissa Hami.) The turning of airports into no-joke zones and the turning of the Muslim comic zone into a symbolic airport are two expressions of a single undercurrent.
. Azhar Usman and Alper patted one another down as they took turns at the microphone.” The discrepancy between the reality of the Muslim community and the stereotypes about it continues to be a source of concern and humor. They do so not only by drawing much of their material from their experiences at the airport but also by literally entering the stage in a mock ritual (anti-rite) of passing through a scanner and being searched by mock TSA staff. doing shows on college campuses and at Muslim and Jewish religious centers. went on to play the role of a terrorist on the rather Islamophobic television series 24. Making jokes in the security check area at the airport is strictly prohibited and punishable by law. but then are surprised to discover that the actor who plays Yasir. The enforcement of no-joke zones at the airports after the tragedy of 9/11 is thus indicative of the paradoxical connection between the tragic and the comic. On closer inspection one sees that the latter is an inversion of the former. onstage wears an Iranian chador (a voluminous black cloak that covers her from head to toe). a woman was jailed for joking about bombs in her luggage.

the restrictive limits on the self and abolishes the gulf that separates the Muslim minority from the American mainstream. 86 min. Muslim comedy is a form of code-switching in the face of situations where the language of reason is overtaken by a wrong common sense or common wrong sense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Produced by Francisco Aguilar and Jaime Valdonado. Bourdieu. Aristotle. N. “You can’t hate the person you’ve laughed with. Richard Janko. Muslim ethnic comedy lifts. 1997. Barron. Indianapolis. Hillsdale.a. Mass. Mikita. ed. which are often oppressive of the minority group. Berger.” That comedy reveals our humanity is well illustrated by a comment from Jewish comic Rabbi Bob Alper. 2004. Trans. I saw you as a human being. The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. N. Peter. 66 min. Bakhtin. stereotypes). 1987. Mikhail. Brottman. What links the nojoke zone to the comic stage is what links the tragedy of 9/11 to the emergence of Muslim comedy. It redefines the common sense. The ability of comedy to disclose the rock bottom of our identities as “human” plays a significant role in showing the commonalities beneath the surface of “difference. It provides a relief from social classifications (a.” Muslim ethnic comedy is part of the Americanization process: the power of comedy becomes a means of undoing otherness. 2008. “The Psychoanalysis of Humor and Humor in Psychoanalysis.: Analytic Press.J.
Works Cited
Allah Made Me Funny: The Official Muslim Comedy Tour.: Hackett.
. By undoing otherness. Outline of a Theory of Practice.k. 1968. Muslim comedy reveals the space of otherness that stretches between looking scary and looking funny. 2005. Richard Nice. Bergmann. Muslim ethnic comedy is the world of Islamophobia turned upside down. Pierre. Rabelais and His World. Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. 1977. Poetics.: MIT Press. Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Hu­ mor. who observed after a performance with Azhar Usman in Detroit on April 1. DVD. albeit temporarily. Ind.” Usman recalls hearing a similar sentiment from a non-Muslim audience member: “I didn’t see you as a Muslim. 2007. Trans. The comic vision rehumanizes Muslims and allows comedians to engage in a symbolic reversal of the social order. Martin.J. 1999. James W. Los Angeles: Image Entertainment. Hillsdale.” In Humor and Psyche: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. DVD. Cambridge.: Analytic Press.Muslim Ethnic Comedy
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or the existential continuity between insecurity and relief.

1 At the height of the media frenzy surrounding Hamtramck’s idhan controversy. Mu‘ath bin Jabal was the only mosque in this neighborhood. Al-Islah Jamee Masjid. support which helped pull Hamtramck’s Muslims out of their immigrant parochialism and into the fray of city politics. One of the city’s newer mosques. This request brought to a head simmering Islamophobic sentiments in the city. attracting new business to the area. and gave the rest of the United States (via an international media storm) a cathartic test of the “freedoms” we were said to be “fighting for” in Afghanistan and Iraq. a working-class. and even international news. as did city voters. it is the largest of ten mosques within a three-mile radius. a story appeared 209
. the Muslims of Hamtramck were very much in the local. In 1990. making its streets safe. attracted anti-Muslim activists from as far away as Ohio and Kentucky. revitalizing a dormant housing market. historically Polish city that is bounded on all sides by Detroit and isolated further by a ring of industrial factories and freeways. on the outskirts of Hamtramck. highly visible Muslim population in Detroit and Hamtramck. Today.9
Competing for Muslims: New Strategies for Urban Renewal in Detroit
Sally Howell
Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal is a Yemeni mosque located in Detroit. had requested permission from the city to broadcast its idhan. Local Muslim and interfaith activists rallied around the mosque. and laying the foundation for an ethnically mixed. In 2005. a Bengali house of worship. national. or call to prayer. from loudspeakers outside the mosque. Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal has been credited (by local Muslims and public officials alike) with having turned around one of Detroit’s roughest neighborhoods at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

Yemenis. due overwhelmingly to immigration from Muslim-majority nations.” This item drew little interest outside the immediate neighborhood. Although immigrants invest heavily in transnational circuits of communication and exchange. for instance. Historian Nancy Foner has cautioned that the exuberance with which immigration scholars have embraced transnational frameworks has led to an overemphasis on extraterritorial networks and transactions.” and it posited the settlement of Muslim families in Highland Park as a corrective to the city’s problems. a new housing development then under way in the city. Immigrants arriving in the U. The story made no mention of the “war on terror. nor did it adhere to the “clash of civilizations” model that lurks near the surface whenever Muslims are discussed in the public sphere. studying these networks to the exclusion of similar local and national circuits encourages scholars to overlook the permanency of immigrant settlement and the gradual disinvestment in transnational relations over time (HondagneuSotela and Avila 1997). Karim 2006. while Hamtramck’s grew a stunning 25 percent. have had a sizable presence in greater Detroit since the late 1960s.210
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in the Detroit Free Press (January 28. Instead it described Highland Park as a “virtually all black. 2005) headlined “Highland Park Schools Seek More Arab.” of a community under siege.” who explained that city officials were “trying to attract families to reside in Highland Park.” Alkebsi provided details on North Pointe Village. Public school officials in Hamtramck and Detroit were placed on high alert. or of geopolitics. both encouraging migration and attuning immigrants to the expectations of contemporary American life much more than was possible in the past (Aidi 2003. Muslim Students: Hamtramck. Swanson 1988.S. a Yemeni American consultant working for the Highland Park schools on their “Muslim package. It was not sensational. Detroit Intend to Keep Them. and they have participated more actively in transnational practices than have other Arab Americans (Abraham 1978. today come better prepared to participate as citizens than did earlier immigrants because an increasingly globalized marketplace and mediascape have already pulled Americans and would-be Americans into common frames of reference. Highland Park’s population shrank by 17 percent between 1990 and 2000. it quoted Yahya Alkebsi. Aswad
. Hollinger 1995. overwhelmingly Christian” municipality with “one of the worst rates of crime and poverty in the state. While the Detroit Free Press story did not mention Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal by name. The Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal “miracle” was exactly what school officials wanted to reproduce in Highland Park. Mandaville 2001). while minimizing attempts to understand the complex processes by which contemporary immigrants “become American” (2001).

Offering packages that seem simple enough on the surface—Arabic-language instruction. They also draw from the historical legacies of Islam and the Nation of Islam in Detroit. and ethnicity as well as across national boundaries. In their work with local school boards. Muslims in Detroit. and with other Muslims in the area. Highland Park. Peter Mandaville has defined “translocality” as a mode “which pertains not to how peoples and cultures exist in places. Likewise. is also intensely transnational. Islamophilia (an attraction to Islam or to Muslims) and Islamophobia (a fear or rejection of Islam or of Muslims) have long coexisted in the Detroit area in highly visible and sometimes mutually inclusive social movements. Jackson 2005. and outreach liaisons to address parental concerns—these programs are designed to attract observant Muslims and
. with long-term consequences for the future of Islam in Michigan. attractive especially to African Americans in times of social upheaval (Dannin 2002. and Dearborn find themselves the subjects of an intense competition by local school systems. social workers. and one another. economic. Turner 1997). but the investment Yemenis have made in Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal (and the American Moslem Society in Dearborn) has coincided with their shifting orientation toward a future life in America. religious traditions that have long offered themselves as different but related fixes for the city’s moral. zoning commissions.Competing for Muslims
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1974). one that is driving up the educational stakes for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Both the Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal neighborhood and the Highland Park campaign to attract Muslim students participate in this “here/not-here” struggle. but rather how they move through them. In recent years these populations have begun to collaborate with one another. Muslims in Detroit (and its surrounding communities) are creating just such a new political space.” disrupting “traditional constructions of political identity” and giving “rise to novel forms of political space” (2001: 50). Hamtramck. closings for Islamic holidays. law enforcement agencies. still relatively new to Michigan. to create a new politics—a transcommunal politics—that borrows resources and ideas across lines of race.2
Promoting Charters and Choices
Living in a highly charged and racially demarcated cityscape. the local Bengali community. municipal boundaries. halal meals. class. Their transcommunal politics move through city lines and ethnic divides to create a space in which they can live comfortably in Detroit while simultaneously disembedding themselves from the social consequences of Detroit’s particular experience of urban crisis and racialized conflict. and political woes.

Frustrated by decades of failure to bring about equity in public school financing and services.400 per student in 2007–2008 (American Federation of Teachers 2007). charter schools.212
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make them feel at home. These packages address the fears of immigrant parents by placing their children securely on the route to “delayed assimilation” (Portes and Zhou 1993). or minority status.S. as this competition grows heated. Yet. programs also available in local suburban contexts (especially Dearborn) and model themselves on Roman Catholic parochial schools. The competition for students between adjoining school districts was made possible in 1993 when Michigan governor John Engler signed the Charter School Act into law. Others argue that these programs offer what scholars of the left sometimes refer to as “horizontal assimilation”—a simultaneous escape from and resistance to the privileges of whiteness (Bald 2006.3 with students taking their state funding with them as they move from district to district. they provide African American families the opportunity to assimilate their children into a Muslim-only educational and moral community and to opt out of (or perhaps write a new chapter in) Detroit’s legacy of urban/racial crisis. special opportunities for prayer and other religious observances at school. gender-segregated classrooms. educational activists from a variety of political perspectives joined forces to support this legislation. which was intended to “supplement” public educational systems in Michigan. similar laws were passed across the U. Similarly. Prashad 2001). all in ostensibly public schools. and again in 1996 when he signed Schools of Choice legislation. Jones 1963. potentially relegating local Muslims permanently to underclass. yet they mirror private schools in that their spending and educational decisions are made independently of local school boards and state educational bureaucracies. more complex options are brought to the table. but they also worry that such packages come at a cost to the Muslim American community. and schools of choice have done little to improve educational outcomes. and from the public system into semi-private charter entities. The “foundational allowance” was roughly $8. Charter schools are funded by the state. duplicated the edu-
. Muslim-only environments. voucher programs. Charter schools and schools of choice are viable because state education dollars are now distributed on a per pupil basis. and. As Bob Dannin (forthcoming) has pointed out in his thoughtful critique of this free-market approach to education. yet they have reshuffled public education dollars into the hands of private educational operators. during this period. including “Arab” (sometimes meaning Islamic) history and culture courses. in many ways. The educators who develop and promote these packages are quick to point out that they replicate. from building to building. increasingly.

After the transformative uprisings of 1967. in reality they often trap children in badly organized schools with inexperienced and unqualified instructors. They also spend much more on remedial services now that they have to assist students who have fallen between the cracks while shifting between districts. and internally decimated inner-city and other struggling public school systems. The competition for this market is intense. Its current population is over 80 percent African American. as happens wherever market forces drive choices. forced officials to drastically reduce services like fire protection. I explore how the market was established. has eroded the separation of church and state. newly arriving immigrants and poor black families were able to move into neighborhoods that were once off limits to them. Public school systems like Detroit’s now have to invest time and money advertising their free. The city’s tax base. and a retreat from entrenched and battle-weary public educators. and a Muslim American market has been created. In this paper.
The Mu‘ath bin Jabal “Miracle”
In recent decades metropolitan Detroit has commonly been referred to as the most racially segregated urban area in the United States. As rents and home values plummeted. consumers are divided into niche markets that are easily manipulated and sometimes driven to excess. a plethora of enrichment opportunities. how it is viewed and manipulated from the outside. the charter movement. little oversight. snow removal. and the repercussions of this market for the transcommunal politics of Muslims in America. and Highland Park flow into each other. most visibly within the zone where Hamtramck. and financial resources strained by exorbitant rents and other hidden costs. jobs and people left the city in record numbers. including several that share long borders with the city. Detroit. decimated by fleeing residents. In Michigan. which in turn encouraged more residents to leave. are over 90 percent white (and less than 3 percent black) (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments [SEMCOG] 2006). and Detroit began a downward spiral.4 The public schools cannot turn away poorly performing students or those with disciplinary problems. while many suburbs. whereas charter and parochial schools can and do. and community policing. And. public programs just to keep existing students. While these new educational offerings promise families trapped in poorly performing school districts academic rigor.Competing for Muslims
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cation bureaucracy.5 The city has lost almost a million residents since its heyday as the “arsenal of democracy” in the postwar years.
. augmented by No Child Left Behind policies. like Dearborn and Warren.

In 1972 Yemeni workers established the Yemen Arab Association and purchased a small club/coffeehouse on Chene Street in Poletown. Still home to a working-class Polish community. While local Poles resisted this campaign with vigor. “The eids came and went with no one to celebrate them. however. The club’s founders liked the idea and hoped it would remind their members of their religious as well as family obligations. They tended to live in sparsely furnished and overcrowded rental units in neighborhoods left behind by white flight. May 7. a visiting Jordanian pointed out to the Yemen Arab Association that they could set aside a prayer space in the corner of their club and use this space as a masjid of their own. There was no place to gather” (interview with author.” where women covered their hair only when they prayed. often near the auto manufacturing facilities where they worked.” remembers Abdu Zandani. the Yemenis quietly sold their mosque and club for a very competitive price and used the cash to purchase a defunct Polish funeral parlor
. Poletown was one such neighborhood. holding regular prayers. and where Christmas seemed almost as important as Eid al-Adha. with its infamous dances and “Sunday schools. Jobs were on offer in an economy that had crumbled after the Arab oil embargo in the previous decade and the recent closing of Dodge Main. Fate intervened in 1980. did not strike the Yemenis as much of a mosque (Abraham 2000). Life at the club in the early 1970s was one in which “Ramadan came and went without us noticing it. a mosque run by an earlier generation of Lebanese immigrants and their children. which quickly became the social center of this small population. these men were more interested in saving money to send home as remittances than in quality of life issues for themselves in Detroit.214
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In this same period—the late 1960s—migrant workers from Yemen began to settle in Dearborn and Detroit. 2005). Yemeni workers worshipped there on occasion. but did not feel very welcome. a founder of Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal. when Detroit and Hamtramck joined with General Motors and the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit to tear down much of Poletown and build a new General Motors factory in its place. celebrating Islamic holidays. because the people weren’t involved in religious gatherings. and eventually raising money to purchase a small house. The club’s members set about making a more formal prayer space in a corner of the coffee shop. it was within walking distance of the large Dodge Main factory. The only Arab Sunni mosque in Michigan at the time was the American Moslem Society in Dearborn.6 In the mid-1970s. which they converted into a mosque of their own. This mosque. They were also eager to strengthen their organization relative to the socialist-leaning Yemeni Benevolent Association. With families still in Yemen. which had opened in Dearborn at roughly the same time.

neighborhood. The mosque can (and on most Fridays does) accommodate 1. rather than Polish or African American. MMBJ’s leaders decided it was time to move again. its priest was eager to hand the facility over to the mosque. People from the surrounding neighborhoods began to take notice of the mosque. There they established Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal (MMBJ) in 1980. most recently in 2005. meanwhile. In 1991 the former parochial school next to the mosque was
. They invested in the area’s decrepit housing stock. carjacked. One morning the dead body of a naked woman was found hanging from a tree. when the crack cocaine epidemic hit Detroit. This new facility has served the community well. As men came and went from the mosque in the evening. Once it became clear that the new jobs promised by GM would not materialize. and Yemeni and African American investors were able to buy houses in the area. For a Muslim community in the midst of a religious revival. Real estate prices entered freefall.Competing for Muslims
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a few blocks beyond the range of the wrecking ball and bulldozer.7 The mosque. married men began to bring wives and children to Detroit. gradually turning the area around the MMBJ into a Yemeni. the mosque’s remaining Polish neighbors moved out. The neighborhood’s numerous abandoned homes made it a center of drug-related crime. Through disciplined effort. When the Catholic church across the street from MMBJ went up for sale in 1987. often for as little as a few thousand dollars. not simply as a gathering of foreigners to be victimized. to make sure worshippers could come and go on foot to the mosque. the mosque’s members began to assert control over area streets. the turmoil on display outside the mosque greatly reinforced its commitment to the moral economy that Islam represented within. Families from a mix of backgrounds began renting in the neighborhood again. This transition was still new and fragile in 1985. began to draw worshippers to the area. When shifts in the Yemeni economy made it less advantageous for men to work in the United States while supporting families in the home country. when work was completed on the now doubled prayer space. The streets came back to life. They joined with other neighborhood residents to report on local crack houses and follow up with law enforcement until the houses were cleaned out. They petitioned local police and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department for more protection. They patrolled their own streets at night and around prayer times.800 male worshippers and up to 500 women in a spacious balcony. they were frequently mugged. They purchased security systems for their vehicles. or propositioned by women looking for their next fix. but as a viable alternative to drugs and crime. It has undergone tremendous renovation and expansion.

The neighborhood drew non-Muslim Detroiters as well. and proximity to the mosque and school. satellite dishes. the crack epidemic had cooled in Detroit. for their part. As population grew. the neighborhood responds. The MMBJ parking lot is filled on summer evenings with dozens of ice cream trucks owned by Yemeni drivers who gather at the mosque after finishing their routes. After a lull in foot traffic. to the unemployed and seasonally employed. and medical clinics.000– 16. and to worship and celebrate Islamic holidays according to
. the neighborhood is home to auto workers and store owners. or by rival Yemeni factions. the neighborhood drew new Arab immigrants who could not yet afford Dearborn housing prices. Today. women and girls take to the streets. the rising property values. The Bengali community’s first mosque. formerly the Sister Clara Mohammed School. are sanguine about the diversity of religious institutions they have inspired in the area. Yemeni travel agencies began opening in the neighborhood. followed by barber shops. Many of these smaller mosques did not survive. Two Bosnian mosques and an Indian mosque have also opened nearby. by African American women. The mosque’s leaders. the “Islamic culture” on display in the streets.000 Muslims is highly contentious. there are four Bengali mosques in and around Hamtramck. As Yemeni immigration picked up in the 1990s. Eventually. Baitul-Islam Jamee Masjid. cell phone centers. other mosques began to spring up in the vicinity of MMBJ. mostly small establishments organized by Tijanis (a Sufi order) or Tablighis (a reformist missionary movement). as well as two Yemeni mosques. vie for space on rooftops and facades. all of which can trace their origins to MMBJ and Baitul-Islam. On block after block of crowded row houses. visiting back and forth among houses. and the neighborhood around the masjid had begun to turn around. walking arm in arm. and that one mosque should suffice for all. and schoolteachers. When the call to prayer is broadcast. Little is left of them except faded signs and handmade shoe racks weathering on unkempt lawns. assemble to worship and hear the day’s news. to doctors. Men and boys. especially the capacious MMBJ. Some observers might conclude (as do many area residents) that this community of roughly 12. opened a few blocks away from MMBJ in 1995.216
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renovated by the newly reorganized Al-Ikhlas Training Academy. groceries. social service agencies. It also drew African American Muslims and Bengali immigrants who appreciated the safety of the neighborhood. all pointing in the same direction. Today. lawyers. They understand that each ethnic community prefers to have services in its own language.8 By this time. a Muslim parochial school that had previously served a majority African American population but now draws Yemeni and Bangladeshi students as well.

less than a third of whom own their
. Increasingly. and rodent droppings. Because MMBJ serves a congregation that is primarily Yemeni and new to the U. covered in dust.S. and to engage actively in the education. was home to the first mosque built in America. The mosque failed. Today the city’s housing stock is crumbling. and missionaries to galvanize the young. adult men meet there to socialize. many of the Syrian workers for whom the mosque was built had moved several miles away to be closer to this new source of employment. but they also believe it has strengthened their commitment to represent Islam accurately and well. taking jobs and tax dollars with them. Boys play soccer in the parking lot. Ford had already begun to transfer his capital investments several years earlier from Highland Park to Dearborn. the Moslem Mosque.9 the same year Ford’s Highland Park assembly plant closed its doors to automobile production. and efficiency.” places where Muslims who reside outside the immediate neighborhood can easily walk to daily prayers. mold. a beautiful Carnegie building. They also encourage the development of “satellite mosques. where he was building the River Rouge complex. both religious and otherwise. The city lost 20 percent of its population between 1990 and 2005. Michigan. Ironically. modernity. in part because of this population shift. On any given evening. a much larger. but still join the larger congregation for Friday prayers and holidays. with middle-class families fleeing to the suburbs. The mosque’s leaders do not downplay the injustice of this attention.Competing for Muslims
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its own customs. The mosque serves as a community center as well. vertically integrated complex of factories. is boarded up with its books and records still inside. when Henry Ford’s assembly line was revolutionizing automobile production and the city itself was a symbol of American industrial might. which opened its doors in 1921. to serve as mediators between the neighborhood and the larger society. of the next generation. Its McGregor Public Library. politicians to canvas voters. the city’s administration and school district were taken over by the State of Michigan in 2001. By 1921. While the city held on to its middle-class status for decades. it has attracted the unwelcome attention and presumed surveillance of the FBI. and was sold in 1927.000 residents.
Highland Park and Hamtramck: A Study in Contrasts
Highland Park.. it suffered the same plight Detroit suffered after the 1967 riots. MMBJ itself attracts over a hundred worshippers. Faced with bankruptcy. dropping to just 16. officials from local charter schools come by to discuss their offerings with parents and listen to concerns about the future of the mosque’s children.

enabling Hamtramck and Poletown to postpone the white flight that sealed Highland Park’s fate in the 1970s. The percentage of households in the higher income brackets tripled between 1990 and 2000 (SEMCOG 2006). The city’s Polish American community. While Highland Park and Hamtramck share a common border. Several first languages. In 2006–2007. Hamtramck began its own rapid decline (Kowalski 2002.2). which was large and politically influential. both are small islands embedded within Detroit (Highland Park comprises 2. on Hamilton Avenue. are gradually being reclaimed by nature. and most interaction with outsiders. they drew Hamtramck’s residents into the northern suburbs along with them. These ruins. Highland Park and Hamtramck are a study in contrasts. In 2000. the public schools. Bosnia. The remnants of several mosques can be found around the corner from Masjid alNur. Bangladesh. with only 23 percent living below the poverty line. so school administrators cannot place children effectively in classrooms until after the first week of school each year. like those of a former Nation of Islam temple. Hamtramck residents were 60 percent white (including Arabs). the Hamtramck Public Schools are filled with immigrants from Muslim-majority nations. Radzilowski 2006). whose city is often described in similar language.9 square miles. Many in the renting population are transient. Detroiters. whose congregation.218
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own homes. 14 percent black. according to Belvin Liles. joke about skirting Highland Park for safety reasons when they cross town. But as Poletown’s families were forced to relocate in the 1980s. The city’s population has increased by 25 percent since 1990. Masjid al-Nur. including Bengali
. and its housing stock has risen correspondingly in value. a trend that enabled immigrants from Yemen. Unlike Highland Park. unlike that of MMBJ. the city is home to one small Tablighi mosque. but Hamtramck was associated directly with the Dodge Main factory. and 12 percent Asian. especially in local labor politics. whose school population is over 98 percent African American. Having transitioned from model city to postmodern dystopia. one of the city’s main thoroughfares. Hamtramck has benefited most from the arrival of newcomers from the Muslim world. and the city today is 98 percent African American (SEMCOG 2006). Currently. Forty percent of residents live below the poverty line. Africa. their classrooms boasted students from twenty-four countries of origin. Highland Park now has one of the worst per capita crime rates in the country. avoids politics. which remained in production until 1979. They were created under remarkably similar circumstances. did not abandon the city as rapidly as other groups. and with one ethnic group rather than many. the director of the Highland Park Career Academy. and India to afford housing in Hamtramck. Hamtramck 2.

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(25%), Arabic (20%), Bosnian (10%), Polish (4%), and Albanian (2%), were spoken in the hallways alongside English (Hamtramck Public Schools 2008). It is difficult to find educators in Hamtramck who speak positively about the challenges this diversity creates. Yet the public schools, overtaxed by non-English-language communities and riddled with ethnic tension among teens, are nonetheless eager to prevent the loss of their Muslim students to charter schools, or to Highland Park.10 It is at this intersection between Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park that the competition for Muslims is being waged.

Free-Market School Reform, Muslim American Style
The Highland Park Schools (HPS) did their homework before launching a pilot program designed to attract Muslim students to their district. They had begun accepting Detroit and Hamtramck students through the Schools of Choice program almost as soon as it was passed into law and had been very successful at drawing large numbers of non-resident students into their district, largely through a simple but well-timed advertising campaign. In 2003 alone, 45 percent of their student population was non-resident, adding over $2 million to their budget, staving off significant school closings, and keeping the HPS administration out of the hands of state authorities. Many of the nonresident students who matriculated in Highland Park had serious disciplinary, academic, or personal problems. The HPS developed a flexible program to help underachieving students graduate or complete GED certification. Known as the Career Academy, it was led by Belvin Liles. In 2003 HPS brought in a new superintendent, Dr. Theresa Saunders, who was eager to expand the district’s policy of attracting students from Detroit and Hamtramck, but she was also under tremendous pressure to raise standardized test scores in the city. The school board sought to bring in a new population of non-resident students, one that would reflect the increasing diversity found in adjoining communities and might also improve discipline and standardized test scores in Highland Park. With these goals in mind, Dr. Saunders was steered toward the Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal model by members of the Highland Park City Council and the Highland Park Development Authority (HPDA), who also had their eye on the immigrant enclaves thriving across their borders in Hamtramck and Detroit. The HPDA was planning a large single-family housing development in the city, North Pointe Village, but was concerned about attracting new residents, given the municipality’s crime rate, low percentage of owner-occupied homes, and abysmal test scores in the public schools. To find buyers for these

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new homes, which would be priced at two and three times the average value of existing houses in the city, they pinned their hopes on the Muslim immigrants who were buying up properties in Hamtramck and Detroit. According to one observer, the project was driven by an “if we build it, they will come” mindset: “If we bring the students, the students will bring their families. They will buy houses, one after the other.” Saunders hired Yahya Alkebsi, a Yemeni American educator, to research the types of programs Muslims in neighboring communities would like to see and then to design a curriculum and other programs to tempt them across city lines. In most of this work, the Highland Park Schools replicated the techniques local charter schools use to attract Muslim students. They begin by offering Arabic-language instruction, which means Arabic-speaking teachers as well. As the competition for Muslim students has heated up over the years, these simple offerings are augmented by an expanding array of options and accommodations, a process that contrasts sharply with that followed by districts like Dearborn and Detroit. Over a period of thirty years, the Dearborn and Detroit districts developed Arabic-language programs, policies regarding prayer in the schools and the observation of Muslim holidays, and rules regarding female modesty in sports or physical education, among many other issues, all in close collaboration with students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Change has sometimes been painful, but the growing presence of Arab and Muslim teachers and administrators within these districts has eased the process of accommodation. HPS, like a dozen or more local charter schools, sought to outmaneuver more experienced districts by hiring an Arab Muslim consultant, treating Muslims families more directly like consumers, and agreeing to segregate Muslim students from mainstream classrooms, a policy that is routinely denied in Highland Park, but is also very much on display in local charter schools.11 When Alkebsi began his market research on the needs and desires of local families, he began in Hamtramck, and the list of services he created reads like a direct critique of the Hamtramck Public Schools. Here I explore the educational options Highland Park developed, providing background into how such programs evolved in other area districts and their current availability. In greater Detroit, Muslim enclaves are acutely aware of the rights and privileges Muslims residing in other communities have achieved, just as non-Muslims are aware of accommodations being made in their municipalities. This knowledge informs the political issues around which Muslims and their adversaries organize, and “special accommodations” in area schools are commonly posed as evidence of changing levels of Islamophobia and Islamophilia in greater Detroit.

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1. Arabic-language instruction. The Dearborn Public Schools, with a student body that is currently over 75 percent Arab American/Muslim, pioneered Arabic-language instruction at the elementary and high school levels in the early 1980s. While it has been taught in at least one of its high schools ever since, at the elementary and middle school levels Arabic is provided in only a few schools as part of a highly praised dual-language program. Much of the campaign to provide Arabic to younger students came from education specialists who had long tried to improve performance for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The program was highly controversial throughout the 1990s, but was eventually embraced by administrators under pressure to stave off competition from charter and parochial schools. In Detroit, where Arabic speakers are a small minority of students, Arabiclanguage instruction was not available until mandated by parent activism and competition created by charter schools in the mid-1990s. Arabic and Bangla are now offered as second languages of instruction in neighborhood schools with a sizable Yemeni, Iraqi, or Bengali population. Only one elementary school, in an Iraqi area of town, offers these programs during the regular school week. The others make Arabic available more sporadically, after school and on weekends, through grants provided by the No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in 2002. These services are usually contracted out to the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), which is based in Dearborn. Hamtramck Public Schools have not yet offered Arabic or Bangla instruction, despite having lost over four hundred Arab and Bengali students to charter schools in the 2003–2004 year alone. Parent requests and lobbying by area mosques and other institutions have not been successful on this front. The district’s guidance counselor, Virindar Chaudery, worked up a lengthy position paper on the subject in 2004–2005, advocating for including both languages in the high school curriculum, but his effort was widely resisted in the schools. Hamtramck’s new superintendent of schools, Dr. Felix Chow, was also approached about providing Arabic-language courses in the high schools. He responded to a committee of concerned Muslim leaders by saying that he did not want to bring “religion” into the schools, a comment that greatly offended those on hand.12 It was in this heated environment that Yahya Alkebsi first began his research for HPS. He originally set out to create a foreign-language magnet school, School A, which would offer a diverse array of second-language options. As Alkebsi interviewed Muslim families, however, he found that even families from nonArab regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe tended to rank Arabic second on their

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list of choices, while Arabs and African Americans ranked it first. When he was unable to identify a qualified teacher of Bengali, he established Arabic as the school’s second-language priority, but promised to add additional languages once the program was off the ground and more teachers could be hired. 2. Islamic holidays. The campaign to have the Dearborn Public Schools close for the two principal Islamic holidays, Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr, began in the early 1980s with parents “kicking and screaming,” according to Wageh Saad, director of student services, to have their holidays accommodated in the same way Easter and Christmas were. This move met a great deal of resistance among teachers, the school board, and administrators, but by 1985, as the Arab populations continued to increase and Muslim students began staying home regardless, Dearborn began allowing Muslims to be absent on these holidays without penalty. (Several school buildings had been 95 percent empty on Muslim holidays prior to 1985.) In 1994, when school finance reform was passed in Michigan, the state began mandating a minimum number of school days with an attendance rate set at 80 percent or higher. Given that more than half the student population was already taking off for Islamic holidays, Dearborn adopted a districtwide policy of closing for Islamic holidays rather than forgoing state revenue for these days. Detroit established a policy of absence without penalty for Islamic holidays (two days each) around 1990. The Hamtramck Public Schools had a difficult time making this concession, even though it is now mandated by law through No Child Left Behind legislation. In 2004, they officially changed their policy to allow Muslim students one day’s absence without penalty for each eid, but roughly 40 percent of their student body observed a two-day holiday, so they changed their policies again in 2006 to accommodate two-day holiday observances. The Highland Park magnet package mirrored Dearborn’s policy. The school would close two days for each holiday. 3. Arabic culture classes. Parents also requested that an Islamic history and culture course be offered as an elective in the HPS magnet. These courses are regularly offered at private Islamic schools, and many immigrant parents are familiar with such offerings from their own educational experiences overseas. African American parents also expressed interest in such an offering, to counter the Eurocentrism and negative bias about Africa and Islam that lingers in textbooks used in public school curricula. Alkebsi wanted to offer such a class as an elective in the high school and to incorporate it into the social studies curriculum at lower grades. Administrators in HPS balked at this suggestion, expressing concern that it veered into the teaching of religion. As a compromise, they accepted a course on “Arabic history and culture.” (Each

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of my informants, regardless of perspective, regarded this course as a Trojan horse for bringing religious instruction into the classroom.) 4. Halal meals. Despite the abundance of halal butchers and groceries in the Detroit area today, it has been very difficult for public schools to offer halal meals to Muslim students. In Dearborn, vegetarian alternatives to non-halal meals have been provided districtwide since the early 1980s, but only a few schools offer strictly halal products. The city has tried to negotiate contracts with several distributors, but cannot get the prices down to an affordable level. A few schools in Dearborn have managed to locate discretionary funds to defray some of these additional costs, but for the most part, even in Dearborn, halal meals are not an option. Alkebsi promised families he would provide halal meals in Highland Park, but he was not able to deliver on this promise. Vegetarian meals were offered instead. 5. Community liaisons. Public school systems in districts undergoing tremendous population shifts are often troubled by conflict, and their administrators, knowingly or not, are prone to identify with the status quo. Dearborn and Detroit first hired second-generation Arab American teachers in the 1950s and 1960s, when their ethnicity was not especially relevant to their jobs. But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, when immigration to Michigan from the Middle East brought thousands of new students to both districts, they began hiring Arabic speakers, first in their bilingual programs, and then gradually in mainstream classrooms throughout their districts. In the 1970s and 1980s these teachers acted as go-betweens for Arab families and the schools. Today this work is handled not only by classroom teachers, but by administrators at all levels of the system and by professional liaisons as well.13 Hamtramck, however, which has seemed to lack flexibility, has refused to hire a liaison for either the Arab or Bengali populations, arguing that “we have students from 32 different cultural areas in our schools. We cannot afford to hire 32 different community liaisons.” In fact, the district’s guidance counselor, Dr. Chaudery, has played this advocacy role with sensitivity and acuity, but even he suggests it is time for someone else to take on this responsibility (interview with author, 2006). This is one of the district’s most egregious offenses from the perspective of Muslim immigrant families, who point out the Polish and other surnames of the district’s staff. As one teacher told me, “In Hamtramck Bengali and Arab students make up half of the student body, but they are not respected by the board, or by the superintendent. I don’t mean that if you are Polish you should study Polish, or French, French, but the community should be approached and be a partner in making policy and getting them involved in the schools. And the administration, they don’t have a clue at all.”

In low-income districts. in the majority of Detroit schools. In Highland Park. or in Hamtramck. Islamic parochial schools in the area do not segregate their classrooms by gender either. Michigan law allows for students to spend up to two hours a week in religious instruction off site. High schools in Dearborn and Detroit often have spaces set aside for prayer during the school day. but Asian students are often hesitant to pray there. and most local districts interpret state and federal statutes as requiring them to offer space to students for prayer. Several of the newer charter schools close early on Fridays or are closed entirely on Fridays so students can attend congregational prayers with their families. Dearborn began allowing high school students to attend Friday prayers during Ramadan in the early 1990s. The Highland Park offer accommodated prayer on and off site. sex segregation is thought to increase student performance and is often considered an attractive alternative to mainstream classrooms. Dr. Students are allowed to pray individually or to organize group prayers on site as long as teachers do not encourage or lead the process. as long as the schools themselves do not endorse or require such participation. Henry Ford Academy already segregates its classes by sex. and administrators all seemed to agree that the number one advantage of Highland Park’s plan was its hardworking and dynamic consultant/liaison. School prayer. As long as both sexes are provided equal instruction within the same school.17 7.224
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Parents. and given the amount of travel time required between school and mosque. although in certain cases in both Dearborn and Detroit students voluntarily sit on separate sides of the classroom. After a period of trial and error.15 In Hamtramck. Gender segregation. perhaps because Chaudery is Hindu. Prayer in the public schools has long been a hotly contested legal issue. only a handful of students in any area high school take advantage of this allowance. The practice is not followed in Dearborn.16 School staff would not lead the prayer. segregating themselves by gender (Sarroub 2005). The No Child Left Behind Act made it much easier for Americans to practice their religion within the confines of public schools.14 Most other districts now accommodate similar absences. although given the irregularity of prayer times throughout the year. provided it does not detract from the amount of time they spend in class. This offering was not one the HPS volunteered to Muslim
. teachers. Chaudery’s office is used for students who wish to pray during the school day. 6. the schools adopted a policy requiring students to return from the mosque with a note from the imam vouching for their attendance. gender segregation is possible in Michigan. but it would be accommodated on site.

an activity he found personally troubling. Much of his time was spent addressing people’s fears about the safety of Highland Park and the quality of the HPS. Yahya Alkebsi was then hired to market School A to Muslim families in the area. It did not. reassuring them that their voices had been heard. The idea was proposed to Alkebsi during the research phase of his program’s development. or Muslim students over Christian or non-religious ones. Gaining the support of mosque leadership. and highlighted instead the foreign-language emphasis of the program and Highland Park’s desire to attract Muslim residents.
Pitch. and Backfire
In promoting School A’s bundle of services. Several charter high schools in the area are now also offering gender-segregated classrooms. Once he saw that for many families this matter was a large selling point. especially the imam. they commissioned a public opinion survey of residents to find out if the program would raise objections among voters.” were refrains Alkebsi heard over and again. most notably Riverside Academy–West. Superintendent Saunders had to move carefully. which is housed in a former Muslim parochial school adjoining the Islamic Institute of Knowledge. “puts you in an enviable position [relative to the competition].18 He also promoted the plan actively in local mosques. a well-established. Once her staff decided that the Arabiclanguage package might work for the city. and you are talking about Highland Park? Are you crazy? You need to have your head examined. He went door-to-door in immigrant neighborhoods. Arabic. conservative Dearborn mosque. She did not want to give the appearance that she preferred immigrant students over African American students. “We are not satisfied with the schools here in Hamtramck or Detroit. then you are trying to bring religion into the schools” (interview with author. because he [the imam] will really help. while English-language stories made no mention of these. revisiting families he had spoken to during his market survey. 2006). The idea took on a life of its own for the Muslim magnet and became a key marketing point and locus of controversy concerning the school. but some people understand that if you are going into the mosque. Success.
. It is worth noting that Alkebsi’s Arabic-language stories emphasized Islamic observances and gender segregation at the academy. February 22. he began promising it to others.Competing for Muslims
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families. He also presented the Highland Park package in local media and received generous coverage in English. and Bengali.

for the most part. April 14. He told me that many of the more conservative Yemeni families. and the school’s director. This factor. who had begun sending their children to Al-Ikhlas Academy when it moved into the Mua‘th bin Jabal facility. “is very strong among Yemenis. adding that most of the Bengali and Yemeni families who leave the DPS are doing so not just because of language or food issues. Others feel the DPS are not safe because they have heard of a violent fight at school. Nadir Ahmad. . Many of them still take their daughters out of school at middle school age and send them back to Yemen. a bilingual coordinator with the Detroit Public Schools (DPS). distribute multilingual flyers. were willing to send their children to Highland Park. It was these families who. April 17. even in a Muslim parochial school. They visit mosques. they can afford to hire people whose job it is just to promote their programs to students. not for the Arabic classes or the halal meals. their future. put School A at the apex of the Muslim niche market in Detroit (interview with author. speak from the pulpit. as well as that of local charters: “Highland Park was superaggressive in their campaign. even offer cash incentives to families” (interview with author. or because of ethnic tensions or discrimination. but because HPS had gone further than any local charters or Islamic schools by offering gender segregation.226
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Administrators in Hamtramck and Detroit were fully aware of the HPS campaign and.” “The ban on premarital sex. They are worried about the moral contamination they see on display in the DPS and are afraid for their children’s future. had the following to say about HPS’s publicity campaign. and sex for them would spoil their character as a whole. took their daughters out of school when they reached high school because they did not like a co-ed environment. Ahmad suggested. 2006). Most of those who opt for charters do so because they feel lost in this new culture. in particular. was more direct in stating his reservation about what the Highland Park campaign offered Muslim families.” David continued. so it is too important a matter to leave to chance. They said ‘yes’ to halal foods. drew parallels between the Highland Park model and the campaigns undertaken by area charter schools. . in the end. ‘yes’ to Arabic instruction. again. Al-Ikhlas Training Academy also lost several families to the Highland Park campaign. Amal David. but because “they want the whole environment to be Muslim or of their ethnicity. 2006). who prefer sex-segregated classrooms. ‘yes’ to prayer in school. but for most families it is a question of being in an environment where the teachers and the students understand about this moral contamination and will not let it happen. The girls in this community still marry very young. . Amal David agreed.”
. in particular. Like the charters.

“If you saw the students that we had (and if things had been allowed to continue they would have grown)—white
. they instead found themselves managing a school program that raised new barriers between Muslim non-resident and non-Muslim resident populations. and perhaps class. it was the school’s offer to isolate Muslim students from the mainstream population that ultimately accounted for its success. and to their own residents. the sexual inaccessibility of their population’s unmarried females. their classrooms segregated by gender. violence. While School A offered Arabic classes and other tools students could use to understand. were connected to the same qualities Detroit’s Muslim families viewed in moral terms and about which they felt intensely protective. Similarly. They saw their neighborhood’s conservative gender norms as an invaluable defense against the qualities of American life most threatening to them: crime. While his education and temperament encouraged him to appreciate the advantages of America’s multicultural society. their rules more open to the everyday practice of Islam. While HPS had marketed the school to non-Muslims in the area as well as Muslims. and the development of an immigrant enclave in Highland Park. It was this same isolation that also brought about the school’s rapid demise. owner-occupied houses. reduced drug-related crime. and entrepreneurialism—qualities they viewed in economic terms and sought to attract to Highland Park. their faculty made up of certified teachers from diverse cultural backgrounds. diversity to their town. contempt for parents. strong ethnic co-residence. As advertised. and interpret Islam for themselves. while the Highland Park Schools had sought to create a “universal academy” that would bring ethnic. He also admits that the competition to attract Muslim families to Highland Park produced outcomes he found personally disturbing. a fear of the larger society and its potential to contaminate the vulnerable and the young (especially females). was indeed at the core of what attracted many parents to the HPS campaign. he found himself catering to isolationist trends in his own ethnic (Yemeni) community. namely. School A opened in the fall of 2005 with over three hundred students. only Muslims from surrounding communities applied. drug use. “I am proud to say that I brought to Highland Park diversity. Their Arabic instruction was more thorough than that of local charters. teen sex. The city’s initial attraction to the qualities on display in the Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal neighborhood—two-parent households.Competing for Muslims
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Alkebsi agreed that this conservative tendency. practice. Muslim families sought to extend the gender-segregated spaces they had established around the mosque into the public schools.” asserts Alkebsi. HPS wanted intact families to contribute to upward mobility.

In 2006–2007 many tried their luck in one of several new charter schools that opened in and around Hamtramck. Hispanics. .’ And the Muslim population said. if you want to do this.
. or even a parochial school. When over three hundred students showed up on opening day. They saw a rejection of Highland Park rather than an integration of it. We want our kids to be a part of it. “If they had given us a chance for the program to go on.” said Belvin Liles. “It looked and acted and felt like a charter school. Bengalis. also offering Arabic instruction. but lost the war. meanwhile. Non-Muslim teachers. Africans. a charter school. Alkebsi found himself listening to hostile statements about Islam.228
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American Muslims. “The African American community said. with Al-Ikhlas Academy.” In this respect it made teachers and administrators outside the school intensely uncomfortable. One school board member asked the superintendent if the Department of Homeland Security had approved their plans for the school. Senegalese. The HPS system had expected one hundred students to enroll in School A during its first year. citing budget shortfalls and the lack of enrolled Highland Park residents. pulled the plug on School A. “not a public school. and prominently displaying Muslim leadership and staff.” Alkebsi argued. When you visited the school you saw all this diversity inside. they saw something else.’” At this point the superintendent. We want real diversity. The district was overwhelmed and also stunned by what Alkebsi’s campaign had wrought. they weren’t ready for this. . fine. Tensions mounted. We don’t want a segregated group. ‘That is not what we were promised. In the words of Belvin Liles. the district had to scramble to make both classrooms and teachers available.” The Muslim students who had put their faith in the HPS campaign wound up returning to the public schools in Hamtramck and Detroit for the remainder of the year. which left bathroom floors wet and dangerous. We want to make—we need to make—small class sizes. ‘Look. HPS had won the competition to attract Muslim students. I think it would have been good for them. Somalis. Pakistanis. They need money and stable leadership. fine. Indians. but from the school side. “There were a lot of challenges from both sides . and with the public schools for Muslim students. If you want to start it in this school. black American Muslims.” Yet as HPS officials looked on. But we want everybody to be able to be included in this school. religious freedom. religious inclusion and all that stuff for everybody. The experiment had succeeded and failed. These schools continue to compete with one another. accommodating prayer. were given a crash course on Islamic practices like wuduu (ritual bathing of the extremities in preparation for prayer). closing for Islamic holidays. then for the program to expand incrementally over several years.

These educational projects are an important stage on which Muslim identities are performed. but by June 2008. the way American Muslims view each other. In Detroit. and manage the phobic and philic tendencies that shape the way non-Muslims view them and. p. youth programs. and foreclosed. and special accommodations in area schools are commonly posed as evidence of changes in the social position of Muslims—their acceptability—in each local municipality.Competing for Muslims
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Meanwhile. assert their rights. today they can be bought for as little as $5. Dawud Walid. North Pointe Village. the housing development Highland Park officials had initially hoped to fill with Muslim families. Perhaps the majority of them have been condemned (Detroit Free Press. evaluated. across sectarian divides. CAIR-Michigan has an articulate. They are also important stages on which Muslims perform their American identities. but the demise of Highland Park’s campaign to attract immigrants to their city took place in a larger context. and championing the civil rights of Muslims when these are threatened or denied. energetic director. It is unclear if a single Muslim family bought into the development. a scant three years after construction began on the first house. urbansuburban unity. these identity projects require Muslims to collaborate across racial and ethnic lines. and incorporated into local political
. School A failed. most of the finished units stand boarded up.000. immigrant and American born unity. often progressive. the houses never lived up to expectations. just as non-Muslims are aware of the religious accommodations being made where they live or work. who seems to be in all places at once. They suffered from plumbing and wiring problems. speaking about Sunni-Shi‘a unity. This knowledge shapes the political issues around which Muslims and their adversaries organize. While initially placed on the market for as much as $155. empty. shoddy workmanship and shoddy materials. Mosque bulletin boards and websites are crowded with notices of fund-raising campaigns for new mosque construction. is also a failed endeavor. or appeals to support poor and war-torn communities around the globe. with its African American history and its multicultural present. Detroit’s Muslim population is active. 2008. across classes. Muslims are acutely aware of the rights and privileges they have achieved. to a growing extent. in which Muslim inclusion and incorporation proceed at a rapid pace. is supported as much by the donations of wealthy suburbanites as it is by tuition from inner-city families.000. across urban and suburban boundaries. comedy tours. Al-Ikhlas Academy. Throughout the Detroit area. Constructed by a fly-by-night contractor. and across the gaps that separate immigrants and their children from those with deeper American roots. and reconfigured. June 19. 1B).

and historically significant Muslim population resides. none of which had been controversial.” and a “9/11 denier” in a vicious media campaign that greeted the public announcement of the school’s opening. Perhaps the story did not seem controversial enough. where an equally large. and many accommodate Muslims with minimal conflict. Almontaser was slandered as a “radical. It is much easier to see how. how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia.
. an award-winning educator and interfaith activist. 2008). In New York City. Perhaps it was due to the way the story was initially framed—not as a tale of Muslims demanding rights from beleaguered school officials. The crisis surrounding the school was so intense that Mayor Bloomberg’s office eventually stepped in and forced Almontaser to resign (see chapter 2). arguing that it “is hard to see how violence. justified his attack in the New York Times. educators who sought to create an Arabiclanguage magnet school recently fared very differently. Daniel Pipes. The Gibran Academy was modeled on the city’s other foreign-language magnet schools. or achieve new forms of public accommodation for their faith. even as the Justice Department has tried to remake Detroit as the centerpiece of its domestic “war on terror. Curiously.” Yet the extent of Muslim incorporation in Detroit cannot fully protect this local population from a national climate in which Islam is routinely represented as dangerous and Muslims as a security threat. the school system. stirring up suspicion when Muslims open a mosque in a new municipality. the religious organizations. businesses and the like you can promote radical Islam” (April 28. many are managed by Muslim teachers and administrators. These schools are indistinguishable from those with few or no Muslim students. The Gibran Academy’s most adamant critic. Perhaps this was due to Highland Park’s relative invisibility.230
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and economic structures in ways that have provided genuine protection from hate crimes and discrimination in the period following the 9/11 attacks. and most of which were prompted by a loss of students to newly opening charter schools.” a “jihadist. Debbie Almontaser. diverse. Highland Park’s School A project was not caught up in this web of sensationalism. but instead as one of beleaguered school officials fighting hard to attract Muslim students. often manifest in the self appointed “anti-Islamist” activists who hound community leaders in the blogosphere. was appointed to establish the Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York in 2007. Detroit’s Muslims contend with local bigotry and ignorance. the media. working through the system. run for political office. the government. Public schools throughout Detroit are filled with Muslim students.

Yet strong opposition to the school emerged that was totally unlike the negative reaction that doomed School A. Miranda Joseph has cautioned those who participate in the work of community to think about how “community. a cultural capital both precious and fragile. In Highland Park. and to banish them from the public stage on which legitimate American identities are constructed. In my experience. African American majority. What they wanted from this exchange was a resource Muslim immigrant communities in the area seem to embody. unlike Highland Park’s School A. and willingness to work so hard and sacrifice so much to be in Detroit. the communities they represent. The city planners of Highland Park actually admired the communities Muslims have created for themselves in Hamtramck and Detroit. In Michigan.Competing for Muslims
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The Khalil Gibran Academy. School A failed because it was seen as a valuable resource rather than a threat. and encourage us as scholars to look beyond the crisis writ large to explore how things work at the local level—the level at which ethnographers and social historians have always done their best. ethnic solidarities. benefited from excellent planning. In the end. they opposed the school because the moral advantages it represented. Ironically. The Highland Park Schools had little more to offer in this competition than their willingness to compete. African Americans in Highland Park suspected that the students and teachers at School A were not willing to share this cultural resource with non-Muslims. public schools compete with one another for students. most distinctive work. This important contrast should attune us to the uneven incorporation of Muslims as citizens of the United States. to challenge their fitness for citizenship.” as an idea. Critics of the Gibran Academy wanted to disempower and silence Muslims. and for capital from the state. this cultural capital is all most working-class immigrant Muslims have. religious orthodoxy. native-born. they realized that tapping into this potential might empower Muslims without producing any tangible gains (at least in the short run) for Highland Park’s non-Muslim. this conclusion is drawn by many educators who are now deeply skeptical of char-
. modest objectives. however. as a site of opportunity and social mobility that was not as accessible to the larger public as school officials had intended it to be. and a solid funding stream. Manifest in their conservative social values. or by the community-building potential of immigrant enclaves. did not seem genuinely public. many community activists describe their projects in precisely the supplementary terms Joseph decries. is used to supplement the marketplace rather than correct its deficiencies. and the economic and political renewal it promised for Highland Park. by contrast. In short. they were not threatened by Muslims.

those with large bilingual education programs and those with other special needs. Together. the Less Commonly Taught Languages Program.
Notes
1. 2. thereby preventing the participation of more orthodox Muslims within the movement. and the CIA. 2006). and working-class enclave. Highland Park’s North Pointe housing development has failed. There you will find the prominent sponsorship of the U. 2006) and Belvin Liles (May 17. Today Muslims (African American. and Yemeni) hold half of the city council seats in Hamtramck. And the White House looks on as well. the urban renewal of Detroit. The public schools there have begun to target advertising campaigns toward Detroit’s students in an effort to replace the large number of Hamtramck residents who now study in area charter schools.html. If you doubt that the federal government is also competing for local Muslims. which appropriated much of Islamic doctrine and practice while rejecting even more. come to the Dearborn International Arab Festival in June. Bengali. Why? Because U. foreign policy has generated a need for more Arabic-speakers who can translate the volumes of intelligence information captured daily in Arabic. including those with affluent. translocal. The exact amount differs from one district to the next based on a complicated formula intended to redress imbalances between wealthy and poor districts. see http://aftmichigan. these Detroiters continue to search for a way beyond the urban crisis that engulfs them. In 2006 President Bush announced a new initiative. that provides financial support for Arabic second-language instruction in target districts throughout the country. Author interviews with Amal David (March 6. Additional funds are provided to support districts with declining enrollments.org/ takeaction/capitol/capitolNO07.S. 4.S. new-immigrant. or higher than. Transnational. whose benefits (such as they are) tend to come at the expense of mainstream public schools.
. or open any of the Arabic-language or Arab American newspapers published in Detroit. Armed Forces. 3. well-established Muslim residents. Suburban communities. It is still not clear who the winners in the current educational competition for local Muslims will be. Such as the Nation of Islam itself. the FBI. look on and draw lessons from Hamtramck and Detroit about who Muslims in America are and what kind of neighbors they are likely to make. Hamtramck continues to struggle with its transformation into a twenty-first-century. And the stakes are as high as. transcommunal—the competition for Muslims is on.232
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ter schools.

The multiethnic coalition that has petitioned repeatedly for Arabic instruction in Hamtramck. and Hartigan (1999). and sectarian reasons. They contend that Alkebsi’s marketing strategy offered more than the HPS was comfortable with. It is the language in which the Quran was revealed and in which most Islamic jurisprudence has been written. the group currently operates six schools (of which two are in Hamtramck. In many ways this is the first “Islamic” school in the country.com/. This statement was controversial because it acknowledged (rightly) the Arabic language’s pivotal role in prayer and other Muslim devotional practices. 12. See http://hamtramck. Established by Mohammed Issa. they deny that this was ever their intention. HPS administrators do not deny that the magnet school they established to attract Muslim families segregated Muslims from others in their district. Chow overlooked the fact that Arabic is also the first language of twenty-five countries and is spoken by over 300 million people worldwide. Dr. A history of the Highland Park mosque is available in my dissertation (Howell 2009). 11. honesty and integrity. and spokesmen for the mosque (December 2005). Hamtramck Academy. and might have reached beyond what is allowable by law. developed and managed over the years by Mohammed’s Temple #1 (now Masjid Wali Mohammed). 9. Hamtramck and Detroit Public Schools administrators have also noted the lack of qualified
. however. It is beyond the scope of this paper to trace the origins of Detroit’s segregated landscape. Farley. 6. I also interviewed Imam Mohammed Musa. despite being headquartered in Ann Arbor. Danziger. It descends directly from the University of Islam established by Fard Mohammed in 1933. chartered by Bay Mills College. but they were not attractive to the Yemenis for linguistic. They do not offer Arabic as a second language. 7. conservation. the Islamic Center of America. The group has recently opened a school that emphasizes Spanish rather than Arabic as a second language. who led the American Moslem Society in Dearborn from 1981 to 2001 and owns a rental property near MMBJ (October 2005). ethnic. and two in Washtenaw County) that concentrate on Arabic-language instruction and a “character building” curriculum that focuses on “respect.” Their high school in Dearborn offers gender-segregated classrooms. two in Dearborn. instead. has an enrollment of 428 and also emphasizes a values curriculum. safety. perseverance. two Arabic-focused charter schools operating in Hamtramck. Both schools are managed by Global Educational Excellence and chartered by Central Michigan University. and Holzer (2000). leaders. cooperation. had a combined enrollment of 879. This narrative of Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabal’s history and that of its neighborhood is drawn from author interviews with Salah al-Ghanaim and Abdu Zandani. responsibility. and consideration. For recent work on this subject see especially Sugrue (1996). 8. 10. and Masjid alMumineen were also functioning in the Detroit area in the early 1970s. Bridge Academy and Frontier Academy. Michigan. founders.Competing for Muslims
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5. At the outset of the 2007–2008 school year. The Albanian Islamic Center. is uniformly Muslim. and spun off as an independent school in 1991.heritageacademies.

14. Vivek. One Dearborn high school. This latter concession is not popular with parents of young children. 53–84. Aswad. Aidi. Barbara C.
. Coverage of Alkebsi’s efforts appeared in the Detroit Free Press.’” In Arabic Speaking Communities in American Cities. Most suburban districts also have liaisons for the Arab and Chaldean populations and for other immigrant populations as determined by demographic need. Prior to this policy it was found that the majority of the students who left school to attend prayers were actually truant from both school and mosque. The Dearborn Public Schools in the 2007–2008 school year had Arab American principals in ten of their twenty-nine schools. ———. diss. Race and ‘Connected Histories.org/takeaction/ capitol/capitolNO07. 2007. Aswad. “Arab Detroit’s ‘American’ Mosque. Communities of Color. among other media outlets. “Overlapping Diasporas. Dannin.
Works Cited
Abraham. ed. 2006. Community Forum and Link. 2003. 18. New York: Oxford University Press. http://aftmichigan.” In Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Robert.html. Forthcoming. and Hamtramck Chronicle. Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock. Hisham. Very few students take advantage of this program. The latter concession was won after Alkebsi shared a hadith with school officials suggesting that if you were within a certain distance of a mosque on Friday. has two prayer spaces. 1880–1950.. American Federation of Teachers. New York: Center for Migration Studies. 1974. one used by Shi‘a and one by Sunni students. 1978. 2000. Charting a New Path: Islam and Educational Reform in the United States. 13. Nabeel. Arab American News. National and Local Politics: A Study of Political Conflicts in the Yemeni Immigrant Community of Detroit.S. “Let Us Be Moors: Islam. Bald.234
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Arabic instructors available in the area and have mentioned this as one reason they have been slow to offer second-language instruction in their districts. See Sarroub (2005) for a different take on Dearborn’s experience of this policy and many of the others described above. “School Aid Report 2007–2008.D. AFT Michigan: Lansing. Multiracial Lives: South Asian Muslims in U.’” Middle East Report 229: 42–53. you were obligated to attend the mosque for prayer. Barbara. and many have argued that it is more appropriate for students to make up their prayers after school hours.” Souls 8(4): 3–18. 15. Michigan. University of Michigan. 17. ed. who are forced to provide additional child care on Fridays due to their work schedules or other obligations. November 2007. 279–309. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Ph. 16. “The Southeast Dearborn Arab Community Struggles for Survival against Urban ‘Renewal. Fordson.” AFT Capital Report.

Mucahit Bilici is Assistant Professor of Sociology at John Jay College. the Muslim World. City University of New York. His essays have appeared in the Muslim World. Her published work includes Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11 and essays in Visual Anthropology. Tomaž Mastnak is Director of Research at the Institute of Philosophy in the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon and numerous articles on the transformation of Shi‘ism in Lebanon. Currently he is Visiting Researcher in the Department of Anthropology. the London Review of Books. and New Public Faces of Islam. The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Muslim Thought. and Western Political Order. His published work includes The Edward Said Reader.Contributors
Moustafa Bayoumi is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College. and Middle East Report.
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. Interventions. Lara Deeb is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. University of California at Irvine. Europe: A History of the Political Concept (in Serbian). Deeb is a member of the editorial committee for Middle East Report. His publications include Crusading Peace: Christendom. City University of New York. Sally Howell is Assistant Professor of History and Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan (Dearborn). Diaspora. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Anthropological Quarterly. and How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Islam at the Crossroads. and Hobbes’s Behemoth: Religion and Democracy. essays in The Nation.

2006). Silverstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. Her books include Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey and The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey. Off Stage/ On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture. His books include Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi: Islam in Modern South Asia and The Ulama in Contemporary Islam. and Nation (Indiana University Press. 2004) and Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press. Race. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. and Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11. Paul A. Andrew Shryock is Arthur F. Naamah Paley is Dorot Foundation Fellow in Israel.238
Contributors
Esra Özyürek is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at San Diego. His published works include Algeria in France: Transpolitics.
. His books include Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. where she is currently doing research on Arab education policy in the Wadi Ara region and in Haifa. Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Niehaus Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University.